Identifying the Critical Infrastructure Objects

Abstract

Maintaining infrastructure asset systems can be challenging for public authorities since we are living in a time where there is an increasing rate of deterioration of infrastructure assets such as tunnels, bridges and streets. This is due to the ageing and the increased use of these assets. As a result, some assets need additional maintenance measures, besides the regular maintenance, to keep them from failing. However, there is a limited budget making it impossible to invest simultaneously in each aging asset. As a solution, the asset manager can prioritize the numerous assets in order to know in which asset needs to be invested first. The sophistication of this prioritization strategy ranges from ‘observations’ via extended asset maintenance logs and logical reasoning down to more complex prioritization strategies which make use of risk assessment. Asset managers can use risk assessments to prioritize investments in the maintenance of their assets by assessing the risks of the assets’ failure. The risk of an asset failure can be defined as the probability of failure times the impact of failure. The higher the risk value attributed to the asset, the more critical the asset is assumed to be.

In practice, however, risk assessments of assets don’t always yield sufficient information to support a prioritization process and help decision makers to decide which investment in maintenance for which asset is necessary first. It appears that to be able to successfully conduct the risk assessment and prioritize maintenance, the asset manager must connect with two actor groups whose perspectives and interests have a big influence on the process which seeks to identify critical assets. One actor is the asset owner, whose interests towards assets are expressed at a strategic level and who speaks a non-technical, political language, has a long-term point of view and cares about social accountability. The service provider on the other hand speaks a technical, non-political language, has a short-term point of view and cares primarily about the functioning of the assets. So, these actor groups do not speak the same language, use different time perspectives and have diverging interests. Thus the asset manager has a challenging position and needs to translate content between these strategic and operational levels. This friction strongly affects the extent to which the asset manager can claim any degree of control over the process of identifying risks of all assets.

A literature review yielded many methods to identify the critical components of an object, which is necessary for determining the necessary maintenance measures to prevent risks. Nevertheless, no method in literature explains how asset managers can identify critical objects using risk assessments. However, such a method is required when an asset manager wants to prioritize objects of an infrastructure system in order to determine which object needs additional maintenance measures first to treat the current risks.

The objective of this research is therefore to develop a systematic process model for the asset manager to identify the critical public infrastructure objects that simultaneously complies with the interests of the three management levels involved in the asset management process: the asset owner, the asset manager and the service provider. This model is presented in an IDEF0 model, a type of process model, which shows the necessary activities, inputs, outputs, mechanisms and controls underlying the risk assessment process.