Infrastructure Condition Assessment, Deterioration Modeling, and Maintenance Decision Making: Methodological Advances and Practical Considerations

Abstract

Infrastructure systems have long been recognized as a fundamental foundation of societal and economic functions such as communication, energy distribution, transportation, wastewater collection, and water supply. These infrastructure systems are both geographically extensive and long-lived. Providing and managing the physical infrastructure over spatially extensive areas and long time spans is costly. The spatial and temporal extensiveness of infrastructure systems also impose a high degree of uncertainty, which complicates the planning for future infrastructure provision, as well as for maintenance, repair, and reconstruction of existing systems. High costs, tight budgets, and previous decisions that were based on erroneous predictions of infrastructure performance seem to be resulting in serious consequences. The National Council on Public Works Improvement concluded in its 1988 report Fragile foundations: A report on America’s public works, that “the quality of America’s infrastructure is barely adequate to fulfill current requirements, and insufficient to meet the demands of future economic growth and development.” Similar and even more serious shortfalls in infrastructure systems around the world were highlighted by the World Bank in World development report 1994: Infrastructure for development Oxford University Press, Oxford, U.K., 1994 . Over the past two decades, serious effort has been directed at improving and managing infrastructure systems. In particular, the academic community has focused on methods for better inspection, condition assessment, deterioration forecasting, and maintenance decision-making. However, as noted in a June 22, 1987 letter to the above named council by George Latimer, former mayor of the City of Saint Paul, Minnesota, the infrastructure problem is “much more likely to be solved—eventually—through deliberate remedial steps rather than through a fast, dramatic ‘conversion’ of practices and attitudes.” Indeed, while the complexities that infrastructure systems entail call for more research, transferring new methods into practice appears equally critical in achieving measurable success. As several of the papers published in this special issue attest, researchers are becoming increasingly