Coordination of urban infrastructure reconstruction projects

Abstract

The large number of urban infrastructure renewal activities occurring in cities throughout the world leads to social, economic and environmental impacts on the communities in its vicinity. As such, a coordinated effort is required to streamline these activities. This paper presents a framework to enable temporal (time-based) coordination of water, sewer and road intervention activities. Intervention activities include routine maintenance, renewal and replacement of physical assets. The coordination framework considers (1) life-cycle costs, (2) infrastructure level-of-service and (3) risk exposure to system operators. The model enables infrastructure asset managers to trade-off options of delaying versus bringing forward intervention activities of one system in order to be executed in conjunction with another co-located system in the right-of-way. The framework relies on a combination of meta-heuristics and goal-based optimisation. In order to demonstrate the applicability of the framework, a case study for a major infrastructure corridor in Cairo, Egypt, is taken as an example. Results show that the framework can be scaled up to include other infrastructure systems located in the right-of-way like electricity, gas and telecom, provided that information can be shared among these entities