Issues in Decision Support Tools for Sustainable Infrastructure Management

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There has been considerable and well-documented concern about the current state of public infrastructure—roads, bridges, water and waste systems, etc. The causes of these challenges are common to many government and utility owners: aging and deteriorating infrastructure; inadequate funding; competing organizational objectives; questionable maintenance, repair, rehabilitation and replacement practices in the past; demographic and population shifts, and new understandings about sustainability objectives. These challenges necessitate that the infrastructure industry excel at developing and managing their infrastructure systems to their maximum potential. To meet these needs, the infrastructure domain requires improvements to the decision support tools that currently exist for sustainable infrastructure management. This paper reviews this problem with a particular focus on the Canadian context, and outlines a course of action to address the current needs. The proposal addresses three domains in the field of sustainable infrastructure management. First, it builds on work to develop comprehensive techniques to assess the sustainability of infrastructure systems. Second, it attempts to advance multiobjective optimization techniques and tools for predicting the long-term performance of infrastructure systems and optimal strategies under a variety of maintenance regime alternatives. Third, it develops data interoperability solutions to create an infrastructure data integrator as a computing platform for this work. DEFINING THE PROBLEM There has been considerable and well-documented concern about the current state of Canada’s infrastructure (FCM 1996, Vanier et al. 2006, Mirza 2007, Rehan et al. 2011, CPI 2013); and this warning applies to many of the developed countries of the world. A recent report on the state of Canada’s municipal infrastructure points at many concerns for both the current situation and the future condition of this country’s infrastructure (FCM 2012). The stated challenges in these Canadian reports from researchers and national organizations generally relate to causes or symptoms that are endemic to infrastructure management in large utilities or at government offices at local, provincial, national and international levels, and that are echoed by owners of 251 COMPUTING IN CIVIL AND BUILDING ENGINEERING ©ASCE 2014