Asset Management: Modeling and User Experience

Facing looming infrastructure crises, municipalities around the world are implementing asset management policies to maximize level of service to residents through optimized scheduling of maintenance, rehabilitation, and replacement of assets. Scheduling optimization problems have been studied extensively in computer science and it is believed that an exact solution to such a problem would take an impractical amount of time to compute. However, several methods for finding approximate solutions have been proposed. This project will involve researching the needs of municipal asset managers, modeling infrastructure planning as an optimized scheduling problem, researching and prototyping modern algorithms for finding approximately optimal solutions to theproblem, and developing software prototypes to facilitate user interaction with the model. The industrial partner, Riva Modeling Inc., will benefit from this research as it will give their clients an interface to sophisticated optimization algorithms that will help preserve and extend the life of longterm infrastructure assets.

Faculty Supervisor:

Dr. Eugene Fiume

Student:

Kiran Sachdev

Partner:

Riva Modeling Systems

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Information and communications technologies

University:

University of Toronto