Search results

A key factor adversely affecting contractor social networking performance is the improper handling and information management of contractor’s services delivery on websites. Contractor social networking is particularly problematic on industrialised building system (IBS) infrastructure maintenance projects where contractor’s certified quality product and firms are not matched with maintenance specialisation services. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This paper reports on the early stages of research which is developing a new information and communications technology (ICT)-based approach to managing contractor social networking on IBS infrastructure maintenance schemes. As a precursor to this work, the paper reviews current contractor social networking websites practices on IBS infrastructure maintenance projects and explores the ICT tools and techniques currently being employed on such projects.

The findings reveal the need for more sophisticated contractor social networking websites solutions which accord with the needs of IBS infrastructure maintenance schemes.

The paper concludes by presenting a research framework for developing such a system in the future.

Maintenance management is a core process in infrastructure asset management. Infrastructure organisations must constantly strive to ensure the effectiveness of this process in order to obtain the greatest lifetime value from their infrastructure assets. This paper aims to investigate how infrastructure organisations can enhance the effectiveness of their maintenance management process.

This study utilised multiple case studies as the research approach. The case organisations were asked to identify the challenges faced in the maintenance process and the approaches they have adopted to overcome these challenges. Analysis of these findings, together with deductive reasoning, leads to the development of the proposed capability needed for effective maintenance management process.

The case studies reveal that maintenance management is a core process in ensuring that infrastructure assets are optimally and functionally available to support business operations. However, the main challenge is the lack of skilled and experienced personnel to understand and anticipate maintenance requirement. A second challenge is the reduced window of time available to carry out inspection and maintenance works. To overcome these challenges, the case organisations have invested in technologies. However, technologies available to facilitate this process are complex and constantly changing. Consequently, there is a need for infrastructure organisations to develop their technology absorptive capability, i.e. the ability to embrace and capitalise on new technologies to enhance their maintenance management process.

The paper provides an in‐depth analysis of three case studies that reveal that an infrastructure organisation cannot avoid the need to introduce technologies to monitor the condition of its assets and to predict when assets will fail. It suggests that organisations must be proactive in searching for the best technologies for their purpose.

School infrastructure is one of critical factors that significantly contribute to the educational outcomes, and therefore, maintaining the high quality of school infrastructure becomes of critical importance. Due to the ageing of school assets over time in combination with budget constraint and rapid growth of student enrolment, many public schools are currently struggling to maintain the required standard for long term. However, to date, the goal of providing the best maintenance practices to public schools has not been achieved.

The present study focuses on studying the balance between the asset and maintenance management strategies and the funding model through conducting state-of-the-art literature review and qualitative analysis in the context of public schools in Australia and other developed countries around the world. Review of journal articles, different government reports and other available resources were used to collect and analyse the data in this study.

As part of this review, significant under investment in maintenance and asset renewals were identified as main challenges in asset management in public school facilities. Although different maintenance strategies were used in school infrastructure, adequate funding, adequate robust asset management plans (AMPs) and the involvement of private sectors have been identified as the key factors that govern the success in school infrastructure maintenance. It also shows that funding of approximately 2–3% of asset replacement value (ARV) on school infrastructure is required to maintain school facilities for long-term. Further, the procurement methods such as public private partnership including private finance initiatives (PFIs) have shown great improvements in maintenance process in school infrastructure.

The study provides a review of different AMPs and funding models in school infrastructure and their efficiencies and shortcoming in detail. Different states and countries use different maintenance models, and challenges associated with each model were also discussed. Further this study also provides some conclusive evidence for better maintenance performance for school buildings.

The implementation of smart maintenance (SM) has greatly benefited facility managers, construction project managers and other stakeholders within the built environment. Unfortunately, its actualization for stakeholders in the built environment in the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) era remains a challenge. To reduce the challenge, this study aims at conducting a bibliometric analysis to unearth the critical success factors supporting SM implementation. The future direction and practice of SM in the construction industry were also explored.

A bibliometric approach was adopted for reviewing articles extracted from the Scopus database. Keywords such as (“smart maintenance“) OR (“intelligent maintenance”) OR (“technological maintenance”) OR (“automated maintenance”) OR (“computerized maintenance”) were used to extract articles from the Scopus database. The studies were restricted between 2006 and 2021 to capture the 4IR era. The initial extracted papers were 1,048; however, 288 papers were selected and analysed using VOSviewer software.

The findings revealed that the critical success factors supporting the implementation of SM in the 4IR era are collaboration, digital twin design, energy management system and decentralized data management system. Regarding the future practice of SM in the 4IR era, it was also revealed that SM is possible to evolve into maintenance 4.0. This will support the autonomous maintenance of infrastructures in the built environment.

The use of a single database contributed to the limitation of the findings from this study.

Despite the limitations, the findings of this study contributed to practice and research by providing stakeholders in the built environment with the direction of SM practice.

Stakeholders in the built environment have clamoured to implement SM in the 4IR era. This study provided the critical success factors for adopting SM, guaranteeing the 4IR era. It also provides the research trends and direction of SM practice.

Infrastructure development and management form the central part of the government's commitment and responsibility to deliver essential services to the communities. However, much focus has been placed on the development aspect, with very little focus on the management and maintenance aspects, causing service delivery problems. This study explores the causes of poor management of immovable municipal infrastructure in South Africa.

A qualitative approach was adopted; thus, a sample of 15 participants consisting of senior municipal workers, local organizations and forums in Ngqushwa Municipality in Eastern Cape were identified and interviewed. The interview data were analyzed using thematic content analysis to determine the common themes and the frequencies.

The study's findings indicate numerous causes of poor municipal infrastructure management, including lack of funding, lack of capacity, poor planning and oversight, lack of By-laws, grant dependency and corruption. The municipality's failure to address these issues has resulted in increased service protests, destruction of public property, interruption of services and loss of confidence in municipal administrations.

Although the study concentrated on one municipality, the findings may be applicable to other South African municipalities.

To provide efficient services for the inhabitants to curtail aggravated service delivery protests, there is an urgent need for the municipalities to institute effective measures to manage and maintain the infrastructure that serves the communities.

The study has identified the factors underpinning ineffective management of the municipalities' facilities and the resultant's effects. Thus, the findings will guide the government and the authorities on the infrastructural management strategies for effective service delivery.

The main purpose of this paper is to develop an approach to analyzing the factors influencing the performance of railway infrastructure, to propose an approach to measuring the overall railway infrastructure effectiveness (ORIE), and to test these approaches in a case study to verify their effectiveness.

The methodology adopted here was to develop a concept for measurement of the overall effectiveness of a railway infrastructure similar to that for measurement of the OEE. The concept thus developed was applied on Swedish railway track sections for collecting data and for their ORIE validation, as a case study.

The findings of the ORIE case study show that the model can be used for other sections of the Swedish railways. It can also be applied to other railways with some modifications.

ORIE can measure the extent to which the railway infrastructure system manages to deliver its agreed performance to the traffic operators. Infrastructure managers can also use the ORIE as a key performance indicator, which can provide important input for effective decision making.

The paper presents a structured way of developing a conceptual ORIE model applied to the railway‐sector. This model can be used by other railways with suitable modifications.

The purpose of the paper is to analyze the relationship between maintenance of existent and investment in new infrastructure in Norwegian local governments.

A reduced form vector autoregressive system is estimated using a 29-year-long panel data set for the Norwegian local governments.

The data reveal that increased investment in new infrastructure sparks little, if any, increase in maintenance. The results also indicate that increased maintenance expenditures spark new investments. Because more investments mean more infrastructure and adequate maintenance should give that investments are not caused by maintenance, the results suggest that the local governments have not optimized their maintenance scheduling in this period.

Even though maintenance and investment are large expenditures that both serve as inputs to the stock of infrastructure, little is known about the relationship between the two. The findings in this paper suggests that Norwegian local governments have not planned their maintenance and investments well in the past, and this can be part of the explanation as to why local public infrastructure in Norway is presently in poor condition.

Transport infrastructure in most countries is owned and maintained either by public authorities, private organisations, or individuals. However, in Sweden, about 50 per cent of the road network is owned and maintained by civic road associations. By using the analytic notion of commoning, this chapter seeks to explore how road maintenance is organised and in what ways civic participation is contributing to infrastructure maintenance. Through interviews with representatives of civic road associations in Vellinge municipality and municipal representatives, we conclude that property owners are being commoned, that is, they are obliged to be a member of the civic road association in the neighbourhood where they own property. This means that property owners are given the opportunity to collectively decide on matters of road infrastructure, including maintenance and investments. Each civic road association is also acting as an organisational collective, demanding or pressuring the municipality and its politicians to reform subsidies and the organisation of ownership of roads and responsibility for their maintenance. As a single property owner, this is difficult, but as an organisational collective, in a civic road association, they have a voice. As a citizen, local municipal election offers opportunities to push for change, but at these institutionalised moments of democracy, road infrastructure issues compete with other issues. Election campaigns rarely target road maintenance, although Vellinge seems to be an exception here. Nevertheless, as citizenship is built around the provision of universal and evenly distributed infrastructure, crumbling infrastructure in different parts of the municipality tends to raise concerns over equal access and opportunities – and also differentiated citizenships.

The purpose of this paper is to establish whether this type of approach is suitable for maintenance schemes from the perspective of both the public agent and the service provider. Until recently, non‐privately funded public‐private partnerships have been adopted for the maintenance of infrastructure facilities.

In this study, stakeholders involved in a trial of a non‐privately funded public‐private partnerships project were invited to express their opinions on the success and pitfalls of this type of scheme. Semi‐structured interviews were carried out with 12 management and front‐line staff of the public and private partners to capture their opinions on the project. A questionnaire survey was also conducted to uncover the views and standpoints of other stakeholders on PPP. A total of 33 respondents completed the questionnaire.

The results indicate that the non‐privately funded PPP approach is more cost‐effective and efficient in the delivery of maintenance services when compared with the traditional term contract. The performance‐based payment mechanism adopted could help improve the quality of maintenance services performed by the contractor. The inspection and programming tasks are transferred to the service provider relieving the workload of the public agency. Most stakeholders who participated in this study agreed that the non‐privately funded PPP approach can allow higher flexibility, encourage innovation, enhance cost‐effectiveness and improve the efficiency of work when compared with the traditional term contract in the delivery of maintenance services.

This paper provides a general introduction to the method adopted in the non‐privately funded public‐private partnerships approach with particular reference to the maintenance of infrastructure schemes. More important, the potentials and pitfalls of using this type of mechanism with maintenance projects are examined, which helps enhance understanding of this rather unexplored topic.

The purpose of this paper is to describe an application of an effective risk-based methodology to support a living maintenance programme for railway infrastructure.

The overall research strategy is a single case study of switches and crossings at the Iron Ore Line in northern Sweden. The analysis was performed as a risk workshop guided by a methodology that integrates reliability-centred maintenance and barrier analysis.

The applied methodology is valuable to systematise and improve the existing maintenance programme, as well as supporting a continued living maintenance programme.

The single case study approach may decrease the validity of the achieved results. However, similar case studies corroborate the results, which affect the validity in a positive way.

The resulting maintenance programme is effective, through compliance with external requirements, and more efficient, through improvements of tasks and intervals.

An enhanced railway infrastructure maintenance programme contributes to improved safety, punctuality, and costs. Hence, railway becomes a more attractive mode of transport. Thereby, it also supports a safety performance of the railway that society is willing to pay for.

Significant improvements of the maintenance programme are achieved through adjustment of inspection intervals and tasks. The results also support the development of indicators, monitoring, and continuous improvement.