A tailored, integrated approach
The replacement and renewal challenge is so large and complex that each type of asset manager requires a different approach. How do you determine whether to renovate, replace or maintain a structure, or whether you can safely wait a little longer? And how do you make responsible, well-founded decisions?
National asset managers, such as Rijkswaterstaat and ProRail, are responsible for managing large and complex civil structures, requiring detailed insight for each individual asset. Iv helps provide that insight. Some structures can be kept safely in service for longer through specific measures. Others, however, have genuinely reached the end of their service life and must be replaced. How do you maintain their safety until then? Iv provides integrated design solutions both for replacement and the safe maintenance of civil structures. Using advanced monitoring, we can monitor the behaviour of structures in real time, allowing us to intervene in a timely manner when necessary. This helps prevent major connections from having to close unexpectedly, with major traffic congestion as a result.
Regional asset managers, such as municipalities and provinces, face a similar challenge. In terms of value, they manage just as much as national asset managers, but across many more structures and with a significantly lower budget per structure. Extensively examining every structure on an individual basis is, therefore, simply not feasible. So what choices should you make? These are significant challenges, but they also present major opportunities. The cost of analysing an asset portfolio can be substantially reduced through a tiered, risk-based approach: focused on the main issues where possible, and greater depth where necessary. After all, we also know that calculating the structural integrity of civil structures is no art form. On the one hand, traffic loads have increased. On the other, structural capacity is often uncertain due to missing data and is therefore estimated conservatively (too low). The result is that structures are calculated as inadequate and replaced unnecessarily. By removing these uncertainties, for example through materials testing and load testing, regional structures often prove to be safe to use for longer than expected – sometimes 10, 20 or even 30 years longer. Our message to asset managers is therefore: value your structures and do not write them off too soon.
