Coordination of urban infrastructure reconstruction projects

• Published in: Structure and infrastructure engineering Vol. 12; no. 1; pp. 108 - 121
• Main Author: Osman, Hesham
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Taylor & Francis 02.01.2016
• Subjects: construction management; decision making; infrastructure planning; optimisation; project management
• ISSN: 1573-2479; 1744-8980
• DOI: 10.1080/15732479.2014.995677

The large number of urban infrastructure renewal activities occurring in cities throughout the world leads to social, economic and environmental impacts on the communities in its vicinity. As such, a coordinated effort is required to streamline these activities. This paper presents a framework to enable temporal (time-based) coordination of water, sewer and road intervention activities. Intervention activities include routine maintenance, renewal and replacement of physical assets. The coordination framework considers (1) life-cycle costs, (2) infrastructure level-of-service and (3) risk exposure to system operators. The model enables infrastructure asset managers to trade-off options of delaying versus bringing forward intervention activities of one system in order to be executed in conjunction with another co-located system in the right-of-way. The framework relies on a combination of meta-heuristics and goal-based optimisation. In order to demonstrate the applicability of the framework, a case study for a major infrastructure corridor in Cairo, Egypt, is taken as an example. Results show that the framework can be scaled up to include other infrastructure systems located in the right-of-way like electricity, gas and telecom, provided that information can be shared among these entities