A reliability approach for management of council owned buildings in Australia

With an aging stock of public buildings, development of innovative methods for management of risk of failure and optimizing of maintenance expenditure has become extremely important to Australian public work engineers. A major challenge in many sophisticated asset management systems is identifying the type and quantity of data required to establish a reliable predictive model for maintenance and renewal expenditure forecasts. With the high variability of condition data, a reliability based approach is more appropriate for predictive modeling. Another important observation made of traditional asset management systems is that the deterioration models are mainly a function of age. This has been observed to be unrealistic on many occasions. The paper presents an innovative approach based on Markov process for deterioration modeling of buildings owned by local councils in Australia. The concept for the complete asset management model is presented with input data clearly identified. Using some preliminary data established from council records and consultation of experts, transition matrices for Markov process modelling have been established for major elements of council buildings. The complete process for deterioration prediction is demonstrated with a typical example