Availability and performance measures for planning maintenance actions on waterways networks

A today’s challenge in civil engineering is to plan maintenance activities on network of infrastructures. Among several difficulties, there is also a communication problem between engineers and managers. In particular, it is of paramount importance that engineers deliver results in a way that managers can understand. Only in this way optimal decision can be met. Pursuing this scope, and focusing the attention on the German network of waterways, whose infrastructures are affected by aging problems and require maintenance, we resort to queueing theory in order to express the networks performance and availability measures in a compact and analytic way. This approach allows us to easily compare and optimize maintenance plans, also facilitating the communication between engineers and managers. A case study is developed, in which we demonstrate how performance and availability measures can be implemented for planning maintenance intervention on a network of locks. The ultimate scope is to shift the current maintenance practice towards a more mature maintenance management system, in which the waterways networks morphology and the amount of traffic are also considered.