Does asset maintenance need a fairy godmother?

Delayed trains, roads closed due to surface water, flooding from burst pipes – we see it all too often.

It’s only going to get worse as we face a changing climate, with flash flooding affecting our homes, or excessive heat melting road surfaces and train tracks.

We know that a lack of planned and preventative maintenance results in less reliable infrastructure systems and shorter asset lifespans.

It also leads to more unplanned, reactive works, which can be costly. At its worst, it disrupts people’s lives and destroys homes and businesses.

So why is it that maintenance is still not given the attention it requires?

Why is prioritising maintenance so difficult?

The benefits of maintenance aren’t always immediately visible.

People do tend to notice notorious potholes being filled in. But in most instances, they don’t appreciate how much work is going into the assets they depend on.

Sometimes, it’s only when assets fail that their poor condition comes to light.

Maintenance and success measures

Similarly, asset owners and operators don’t necessarily understand the connection between maintenance and the goals of their organisation.

If owners focused on how their existing assets could help them achieve their business objectives, it might be easier to secure funding to maintain them.

In the public sector...

When it comes to public infrastructure, there’s always the tension between spending money on new projects (CapEx) or maintaining existing ones (OpEx).

Politicians often find it more attractive to announce and finance shiny new capital projects and schemes than set aside some of that funding for maintenance.

This can lead to stop-start investment for maintenance, which often means short-term fixes take place, but it’s very difficult to undertake the longer-term planning needed to best manage assets.

In the private sector...

In the private sector, financial budgets could better incentivise more effective asset management.

Water companies, for example, budget on total expenditure (TotEx) – the sum of CapEx and OpEx. This means that capital and operational spending isn’t ringfenced and can be split in the most optimal way.

Success is then determined in terms of effectively managing the performance of assets that were funded through that TotEx spending.

Public-private partnerships

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) and ‘build and operate’ contracts are supposed to incentivise a whole-life perspective.

But discount rates used in the private sector can focus attention on short-term cost cutting rather than whole asset life.

And if an asset owner is planning to sell on their asset, they may be motivated to run down its condition.

A way to prevent this is to pre-define the performance requirements that the asset must meet at the end of a period of ownership.

Making the case for maintenance

If assets aren’t maintained, it will result in higher capital spending in the long term, and disruptions and poor service for customers in the short term. It’s a lose-lose.

We need to get better at making the case for appropriate and sustained spending on asset management. That’s not easy.

While we know how much maintenance costs, getting a handle on how it benefits asset performance can be a lot harder.

Sometimes it’s quite obvious – like the difference in flooding that occurs when a trash screen on a culvert is blocked, compared to when it’s clear.

Other times, deterioration is a lot harder to spot, and the relation between it and the probability of asset failure is a lot less clear.

Weighing up different scenarios

For example, we know that flood embankments that are rutted, fissured or have animal burrows are less reliable. But how much less reliable isn’t easy to quantify.

It’s also hard to predict how quickly the deterioration might progress in the future, with or without maintenance, and in different climate conditions.

But we need to do all of that so that we can weigh up the cost of maintenance with the loss that we can expect to incur in the future if we do not maintain enough, or too much... or get it about right.

Asset managers and engineers need to advocate these points to financial planners and decision makers at their organisations.

How to predict asset health and resilience

Using predictive indicators of asset health can help. It's something that the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) in the UK – now superseded by the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA) – had argued for.

The NIC also recommended more complete use of resilience standards. These set a clear target for what performance we should be aiming for, under what circumstances.

The NIC considered three kinds of standards:

• Customer outcome standards: service quality and reliability outcomes for customers – such as average length of service outages in a year.
• System performance standards: standards a system is required to meet – such as being able to deliver a service even after the failure of the biggest asset within a system.
• System recovery standards: expected service recovery times after a service outage and the level of backup services which must be supplied to consumers in the event of an outage.

The NIC’s review of resilience standards was actually quite reassuring, but there are still some gaps. Namely, the lack of a forward-looking standard for energy and water supply resilience.

We can’t just worry, we’ve got to do something

Maintenance may be the Cinderella of civil and infrastructure engineering, but technology is making it a lot more exciting.

Through sensors, machine learning, digital twins and more we can start to predict the future health and performance of assets and make a plan to maintain it.

Which brings us back to the main point: as infrastructure professionals we can’t just worry about infrastructure maintenance and asset management. We’ve got to do something about it.

And that starts with making a really rigorous business case for why modernising asset management will make life better for everyone in the future.