Enhancing Asset Management Priority RankingA Case Study
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abstract
Over the last several years, failures of various large diameter lines have made the national news. Some of these failures became catastrophes of significant scale with grave social and environmental impacts. Many of these occurred within utility systems that have some form of an asset management program, which most agencies now utilize to proactively maintain and identify infrastructure issues and to implement a systematic plan that addresses conditions and extend the life of the asset. While this technical approach is critical to asset management, it often neglects to assess the social and environmental factors associated with the infrastructure - factors that if overlooked may serve as an origin of catastrophe later. Considering that many of the nation's large diameter lines are approaching or have past their original design life expectancy, a comprehensive asset management prioritization model is needed that offers standardized measures of consequences of failures. In this paper, we present a replicable framework for assessing pipelines on two tiers: technical and social/environmental. We demonstrate through a case study of the City of Houston that a standard condition assessment program can be enhanced by our two-tiered method. 2012 American Society of Civil Engineering.
