Maintenance Planning

Abstract

The planning of maintenance activities helps ensure that infrastructure provides adequate levels of service. This course introduces the development of maintenance strategies, the conversion of strategic guidance into system plans, and the selection of an intervention portfolio across multiple systems. The course consists of weekly lectures, a group project, and help sessions.

Objective

The objective of this course is to provide a first experience with how maintenance activities are planned from the strategic level to the system level to the portfolio level. Upon completion of the course, students will be able to: • develop asset maintenance strategies that are aligned with strategic goals of an organisation. These strategies will include consideration of how an asset may change over time, the different times that maintenance interventions can be executed, and the different ways that the performance and condition of assets can be monitored. • develop and modify system plans using information from the asset management strategies and considering how infrastructure network performance depends on the asset. • develop a portfolio of interventions taking into consideration overarching constraints, i.e., constraints that extend across multiple systems.

Content

The weeks of this course are structured as follows: Introduction 1. Introduction: In this lecture we introduce the maintenance planning process, with emphasis on the consideration of the benefits and costs of infrastructure to all members of society and balancing the need for prediction accuracy with analysis effort. We also discuss the measures of service, the ideas of quantifiable and non-quantifiable benefits, proxies of service, and valuing service. We outline the expectations of you throughout the semester and describe the course project. 2. Maintenance planning levels: Asset maintenance strategies explain the activities required to ensure a general asset of a specific type provides an adequate level of service, including the required interventions and the required monitoring activities. System plans explain the activities required for a specific system to provide an adequate level of service over a specific time period. Portfolios of work are the activities that are to be financed in the next planning period. In this lecture, we discuss the purpose and content of all three with a special emphasis on the asset maintenance strategies. Intervention strategies 3. Deterioration and interventions: In this lecture we discuss the aspects of deterioration and interventions that are required to construct and evaluate the timing of interventions on an asset. This includes the connection between provided service and the physical state of the infrastructure, and how this state can be expected to change over time. 4. Intervention strategies: In this lecture we discuss one mathematical model that can be used to evaluate maintenance strategies assuming that there is perfect information. 5. Help Session 1: This week we offer help in the evaluation of the intervention portion of asset maintenance strategies. Monitoring strategies 6. Monitoring activities: In this lecture we lay the foundation for you to determine how to collect the information you need on your assets to appropriately trigger the interventions you plan to include in your asset maintenance strategy. 7. Monitoring strategies: In this lecture we discuss one mathematical model to evaluate the monitoring strategy portion of management strategies. 8. Help Session 2: This week we offer help in the evaluation of the monitoring portion of the management strategies. Strategies to portfolios 9. Strategies to system plans: In this lecture we discuss how the information from asset maintenance strategies is used to develop base system plans and how these system plans need to be modified taking into consideration how specific systems function. 10. System plans to projects: In this lecture we discuss how the needs for system modification are converted into projects. 11. Strategies and projects to portfolios: In this lecture we show how the cumulative amount of work planned across multiple systems is considered in a portfolio of work to be financed, regardless of whether individual assets have progressed to the project phase. Additionally, we show how to present the portfolio so that the ramifications of less than full financing are clear. 12. Help Session 3: This week we offer help in the development of system plans, the evaluation of a project, and the development of a portfolio of work to be financed. Wrap up 13. Wrap-up: In this week, we recap the course along with two presentations to demonstrate how the knowledge gained can be applied in practice, and students hand in their report. The course uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches. It is expected that the calculations are done using Python, but some students may choose to use Excel or R.

Resources