Integrating lifetime performance and life-cycle cost in management of civil infrastructures

The managers of civil infrastructures are responsible for making the most appropriate decisions for integrating lifetime performance and life-cycle cost. These decisions have to balance, in an optimal way, conflicting requirements such as maximizing lifetime performance and minimizing life-cycle cost. In order to achieve this objective, it is necessary to understand the overall process of assessing, predicting, and planning interventions on existing civil infrastructures. This paper is intended to provide a brief overview of this process by integrating lifetime performance and life-cycle cost using a probabilistic perspective. Recent advances at the University of Colorado in probabilistic maintenance, reliability, and cost modeling, including their interactions, and in probabilistic maintenance optimization over a specified time horizon are briefly summarized.