End of Asset Life Reinvestment Decision Making Process Tool for Advanced Asset Management: Theory, Development and Validation through an Utility Case Study

Determining which investment strategy (i.e.-mix of operations, maintenance, capital) should be deployed for a given asset and when that strategy should change across the life cycle lies at the heart of the “end of asset life reinvestment decision making process tool”. This paper presents the development of the decision making process tool which uses the asset reinvestment decision process flow diagram developed for the USEPA Advanced Infrastructure Management class as an over-arching framework. This integrated web-based system will assist the practitioner in making enhanced reinvestment decisions. The tool incorporates a refined risk-based decision making methodology that presents the user with a process to minimize total cost to the utility – including cost of deferral or avoidance of the consequences to customers and community of failure and benefits accrued, to drive investment. In this paper, we present the theory, development and validation of the web-based decision making process tool through work done with the Metropolitan Sewer District (MSD) of Greater Cincinnati. Results of the case application using MSD's dataset, a wastewater and water linear asset, will demonstrate the usability of the web-based reinvestment decision making system, and validate its effectiveness of the web-based system in analyzing the data using metrics for accessibility, capability, flexibility, and user friendliness.