Author(s)

Frederick Bloetscher¹, Lloyd Wander², Greg Smith², Nihat Dogon³

¹Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatics Engineering, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, USA.
²Utility Sealing Services Inc. in Venice, Venice, USA.
³ModelsbyToggles Inc., Phoenix, USA.

When creating an asset management plan, missing data is perceived to be a huge problem, especially when the event data (breaks in water distribution pipes as an example) are not tracked. The lack of tracking makes it difficult to determine which factors are the critical ones. Many utilities lack the resources for examining buried infrastructure, so other methods of data collection are needed. The concept for this paper was to develop a means to acquire data on the assets for a condition assessment (buried pipe is not visible and in most cases, cannot really be assessed). What was found was that for buried infrastructure, much more information was known than anticipated. Knowing exact information is not really necessary. However, there was a need to track event-breaks, flooding etc.—what would indicate a “failure”. The latter would be useful for predicting future maintenance needs and the most at-risk assets.

Bayesian, Information Theory, Asset Uncertainty, Infrastructure

Bloetscher, F. , Wander, L. , Smith, G. and Dogon, N. (2017) Public Infrastructure Asset Assessment with Limited Data. Open Journal of Civil Engineering, 7, 468-487. doi: 10.4236/ojce.2017.73032.