Welcome to the IALCCE LCM-Workshop 2019. It’s a great opportunity to discuss Life Cycle Management with an international audience of about 100 delegates from 14 countries. There’s much to be learned, and there’s much to be done in practice too. Life Cycle Management is of vital importance to build a sustainable future, fit for future needs, resilient to expected and unexpected events and cost effective over time.

 

A new way of thinking

Life Cycle Management (LCM) deals with management of performance, risks and cost from life-cycle perspective, in a continuously changing environment. There are yet many challenges to conquer. LCM is a topic where academics and practitioners need to take steps forward. The IALCCE Workshop on Life Cycle Management 2019 brings world experts together to discuss recent progress and formulate future directions to Life Cycle Management in the field of Civil Engineering.

 

Workshop topics

During the LCM-workshop practitioners and scientist will exchange ideas and views on Life Cycle Management. Workshop means interaction, active listening, and also active discussion. In the workshop, we will discuss a limited set of ideas and solutions that may help to enhance life cycle cost, life cycle risk or life cycle performance on one of the seven themes:

1. Data & information
2. Environmental Impact
3. Resilience
4. Structural reliability
5. Durability
6. Systems & Networks
7. Organizations and Processes

I wish the audience a fruitful workshop these 2 days and I hope you will also enjoy the great atmosphere on the SS Rotterdam, the former flag-ship of the Holland America line. This boat has shipped immigrants to America with dreams of a better future. Once again, we will dream!

Maintenance is the new development

Rotterdam is a pioneering city in the field of integrated future-oriented management

Cities right across the world are confronted with major issues in the areas of energy, climate, resource scarcity, healthy, mobility and congestion. European cities will need to face enormous replacement tasks during the forthcoming decades. A multitude of buildings, infrastructure and sewage systems from the 1950-1980 period will need to be renewed or replaced.

These tasks offer enormous opportunities for innovation, the valorisation of flows in the city, the application of new systems and establishing connections with social assignments. Opportunities to make these areas gas-free, climate-adaptive, energy-neutral or circular. It will also result in the necessary momentum to realise a public space which is far better suited to the population.

Management organisations are responsible for many of the aforementioned tasks, systems and assets.  They have access to the required investment resources and the knowledge to solve these major issues. However, these investors will need to dare to take more of an initiative in innovation processes, act more integrally and strategically and also take the lead where sharing knowledge is concerned.

We manage assets worth 170 billion euros in the Netherlands and spend an impressive 15 billion euros on management each year. We own almost 13 billion euros’ worth of capital goods in Rotterdam, plus we annually invest 190 million in management and replacement.

I would like to use my presentation to show how Rotterdam has developed over the past decades, from an unattractive reconstruction city to a city rated as being in the top 10 of the Lonely Planet travel guide. And I would like to demonstrate how the city is preparing for the future and taking substantial steps in the field of integrated customisation in asset management and smart, future-oriented management.

LCM of civil infrastructure integrating risk, resilience and sustainability

In their decades- or even centuries-long life-cycle, civil structures and infrastructure systems are facing threats from structural deterioration, increasing demand and various natural and man-made hazards. In wake of the recent disasters, it has been demonstrated repeatedly that civil infrastructure plays a central role in the preparedness, resistance, response, and recovery of communities under adverse events. Recently, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) outlined the Grand Challenge for civil engineers — “to significantly enhance the performance and value of infrastructure projects over their life cycles by 2025 and to foster the optimization of infrastructure investments for society”. To fulfil this challenge, the civil engineering profession needs to rethink and innovate life-cycle management philosophies and methods. This presentation overviews the life-cycle management with emphasis on the techniques recently developed at Lehigh University [1]. These techniques integrate life-cycle risk, lifetime resilience, and overall sustainability in the decision-making process of various managerial actions throughout the service life of infrastructure assets (e.g. maintenance, repair, retrofitting, and rebuilding).

As a performance indicator, life-cycle risk combines failure probability of structures with failure consequences. Given the limitation of financial resources, this combination provides a more rational appraisal of intervention needs of infrastructure assets. The importance of network-level risk assessment is highlighted in particular [2]. Lifetime resilience [3,4] is a novel concept proposed to embed resilience analysis into the life-cycle management of deteriorating structures. It can consider the interaction between long-term structural deterioration and punctuated performance disturbance due to multiple hazards. Finally, sustainability-informed decision-making is introduced to cover social and environmental aspects of life-cycle intervention actions. This allow for the shift from the conventional life-cycle cost analysis to overall life-cycle sustainability assessment [5], one step further towards the solution for the ASCE Grand Challenge.

Digital Transformation in Asset Life Cycle Management

The aim of implementing Asset management is to create value by means of an optimal deployment of assets. To achieve this, information on the condition and functionality of these assets is needed, among others. This information is then used to assess risk which form the basis for decisions on maintenance scheduling, asset replacement and the use of assets.

(visual) inspections are commonly used to assess asset condition. However, (visual) inspections have a number of shortcomings: subjectivity of inspectors, relative limited frequency by limitations in costs, capacity, worker safety and traffic disturbance, lack of information on non-visible parts of the asset. In addition, for existing assets information on structural design and history of use and maintenance are often lacking.

Some of these shortcomings may be partially overcome by training inspectors, standardizing procedures and adding (non)destructive testing methods. In practice, this enables a relatively effective asset management of infrastructural assets.

However, asset owners and asset managers find themselves confronting new challenges: aging assets, climate change and changes in the way assets are being used. In addition to this, society increasingly demands accountability from asset managers, especially in the light of recent failures of infrastructural assets. All this results in an uncertainty we have summarized in four questions:

1. What is the exact development of the quality of our existing assets? When is renovation, rehabilitation or replacement needed?
2. What will the future bring? Which technological solutions will be available and in which timeframe?
3. What will be the impact of these developments on the functionality of our assets and asset-system?
4. How can we involve an ever increasing number of stakeholders in our decision making processes?

Developments in the digital domain offer new opportunities to improve existing inspection procedures. In this keynote, we will present an overview of current developments, including Smart bridge Leeuwarden, Drones and deformation measurements of quay walls in Amsterdam and the use of Augmented Reality for bridge inspections. We will discuss current limitations and next steps to improve these application and discuss how these developments aid a better understanding of asset performance, a better management of risks and costs.