Date of Award
9-12-2018
Publication Type
Master Thesis
Degree Name
M.A.Sc.
Department
Civil and Environmental Engineering
Keywords
Asset Management, Civil Engineering, Climate Change, Scorecard, Stormwater Management, Sustainability
Supervisor
Tam, Edwin
Rights
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Abstract
As the world faces climate and resource pressures, there is an ever-growing demand for sustainable products and processes throughout the whole life cycle. Sustainable infrastructure has become one of the leading research topics in civil engineering. It refers to mitigating, decreasing, and even eliminating the social, economic and ecological impacts during the lifecycle of an infrastructure project, which includes its design, construction and operation. However, achieving sustainability is challenging and requires an interdisciplinary approach because of the many variables that need to be understood and assessed. One field of expertise long practiced by municipal management but not necessarily by engineers is asset management. Asset management focuses on reducing risk while increasing the level of service. From an engineering perspective, physical characteristics dominate what should be assessed to improve infrastructure. What can be often missing is the perspective on how to effectively manage assets to best meet the community’s needs, especially in situations where systems have been engineered to be as effective as realistically possible. Actively incorporating asset management approaches into sustainability assessment should significantly improve our understanding, analysis, and decision-making on how to engineer, maintain, modify, and even demolish infrastructure to meet our future challenges. This research project will use a risk management framework to improve how a current stormwater system can be effectively managed. The framework will examine different mitigation factors. Using these factors, the framework will predict if a certain area is at a high or low risk. A case study will be undertaken using a mid-sized city to demonstrate the viability of the framework. The framework will assist in answering the question: will using an asset management approach improve infrastructure sustainability in stormwater systems?
Recommended Citation
McDonald, Mirandi Lynn, "Integrating Asset Management to Achieve Infrastructure Sustainability and Resiliency in Stormwater Systems" (2018). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 7544.
https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/etd/7544