Multi-Tiered Database Schema for Integrated Municipal Asset Management

Municipality Engineers and decision makers have to consult and utilize large data sets to make informed management decisions concerning individual and/or integrated infrastructure assets. Such data is gathered and processed more than once, by different users; furthermore, it is usually stored in different repositories and in different formats. This reality necessitates the design and utilization of databases that are specially structured to facilitate the management of such massive volumes of interrelated data. This paper presents a multi-tiered database schema for integrated infrastructure management. The schema is multi-tiered to be usable by different size municipalities; adopting different approaches for asset management. The presented schema comprises a basic tier for managing basic data of separate assets through running common asset management processes, a second tier for running advanced asset management models, and a final tier for managing special data required for specific usage. The database schema can be utilized for managing basic data of separate assets, and its full scale implementation allows managing integrated assets using data generated by different up-to-date asset management tools. The database schema is implemented in ArcGIS and applied to a municipal database containing data for water, sewer and road networks to demonstrate its applicability and essential features.