Abstract

Best practices for municipal asset management require municipalities and communities to clearly define their expectations and to express that in terms of achievable goals for levels of service. The challenge lies in the fact that asset performance from a community perspective may be quite different from a municipality perspective. The real problem is to inter-relate these two perspectives and to determine the optimum quantity of improvement required in the condition of municipal assets to meet community expectations. The literature reveals the need for development of such methods and management tools to support solutions for sustainable municipal assets that take the above into consideration. To address these issues, a community driven level of service based methodology is developed for municipal corridor management that integrates technical and financial plans of a municipality. The concept of municipal corridor is augmented for the purpose of determining integrated repair/ rehabilitation interventions for pavement, water distribution and sewer collection assets and is termed here as municipal corridor rehabilitation. The developed methodology comprises of three phases. In the first phase, performance modelling and mapping the targeted levels of service to condition rating is developed to quantify asset condition improvement. This is achieved via three models; (1) Analytical Hierarchy model to relate Level of Service with required performance, (2) Fuzzy weighted average model to assess the capacity to deliver targeted performance and (3) Fuzzy Alpha Cut model to map the asset improvement requirement and asset capability. The output of this phase is fed into the second phase, where prioritization of corridors’ intervention plans is established, using an Artificial Neural Network model. In the last phase, the outputs of the preceding two phases are utilized as input to develop a Goal Programming based optimization model which generates optimised intervention plans of municipal corridors. The developed methodology was applied to a case study in the City of Riyadh in KSA to demonstrate its use and to illustrate its capabilities. The results obtained were found acceptable by management of that city. The case demonstrated the flexibility and utility of the developed methodology and its models in support of integrated optimized intervention plans for water, sewer and municipal roads.