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Multi-criteria decision based evaluation of municipal infrastructure projects

University of British Columbia

Public and private agencies that are in charge of planning, evaluating, and executing the operation, maintenance, and renewal of assets are always faced with difficulties, such as aging assets and funding limitations. In addition, the growth of population and increasing environmental protection and preservation concerns and regulations have already put more pressure on involved agencies and organizations to establish more efficient, effective and even more sustainable investment plans. The motivation of the thesis is to assist the agencies involved in asset management to allocate their funds and resources more efficiently and cost effectively in order to provide a basis for reducing the amount of future budget requirement and keeping the assets at the same or even better condition. This research reviews the strategic goals and objectives of typical municipalities in order to identify the strengths and weaknesses of ongoing municipal asset management; an efficient and more practical decision making process at the strategic level of municipal asset management has been developed. Infrastructure asset management entails multiple steps, processes, and management levels. A formal and typical structure management of infrastructure systems can be divided to three main levels: project level, network level (or tactical level), and strategic level. This thesis concentrates on the strategic planning that is done by senior managers in municipal governments. Furthermore, municipal infrastructure in this research is limited to pavements, bridges, water and sewer networks; however, all findings are applicable to similar type infrastructure assets. The methodology of this research entails four main parts: preparing a comprehensive literature review of the domain, developing the decision making process, designing and conducting a survey regarding municipal priorities, analyzing the responses, and proposing and testing a suitable and practical solution for decision making for municipalities.

Text

2012-09-28

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/43290

Civil Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/