Importance of Maintenance Planning for Integrated Systems
Maintenance planning is crucial in ensuring the longevity, safety, and efficiency of civil-engineered systems. Infrastructure assets, such as buildings, bridges, roads, and wastewater systems, inevitably deteriorate over time due to material ageing, environmental exposure, and operational demands. A well-structured maintenance strategy helps mitigate these effects, reducing the risk of structural failures and optimizing resource utilization. Integrated maintenance planning is particularly vital for complex systems where multiple subsystems interact. Without a coordinated approach, individual components may fail prematurely, leading to increased costs, downtime, and inefficiency. By ensuring that all subsystems work in harmony, integrated maintenance strategies contribute to achieving long-term sustainability and cost-effectiveness.
Role of Multi-Objective Optimization
Traditional maintenance approaches often focus on minimizing costs or extending service life without fully considering trade-offs between economic, environmental, and functional performance. Multi-objective optimization offers a solution by balancing multiple conflicting factors. These include:
- Minimizing life-cycle costs
- Reducing environmental impact
- Ensuring high service levels and safety standards
By applying computational optimization techniques, maintenance schedules can be fine-tuned to improve decision-making. This results in data-driven strategies that enhance overall system performance, ensuring that trade-offs between objectives are balanced effectively. This approach provides an optimal solution that considers cost and integrates sustainability and service quality.
Objectives of the Study
This study aims to:
- Define various intervention scenarios for maintenance planning across different infrastructure systems.
- Integrate Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) to evaluate both environmental and economic impacts.
- Define optimal maintenance intervals and intervention strategies to enhance system reliability and performance.
- Assess the interdependencies between different subsystems, ensuring a holistic maintenance approach is adopted.
- Develop a multi-objective optimization framework to find the best trade-off solutions for multiple conflicting objectives