PANTA Anand

26133505

Assignment
Lifetime Engineering for Civil Infrastructure

As a maintenance engineer, explain the procedures for the life-cycle management of a

number of structures as well as important points to be focused on.

Maintenance plays an essential and integral role in the long term life of the structure. Structures left to
deteriorate without timely maintenance treatment will likely require more costly treatments sooner
than those properly maintained. Thus for the satisfactory performance of the structure, proper
maintenance plays a vital part. Thus, as a maintenance engineer, the maintenance procedures that
should follow based on lifecycle management concept is shown in the figure 1.

Figure 1: Flow of maintenance procedures based on life cycle management concept (Reference: Lecture note)

In order to keep the structural performance over required level, regular assessment should be done
which should include preliminary and detailed inspection (as in Figure 2). Based on the inspection
results, quantitative evaluation and prediction of future performance degradation of the structure or
components are essential to the life-cycle based maintenance (as in Figure 3). Maintenance engineer
should continuously make every effort to establish evaluation and prediction techniques for every type
of structures. Finally, after the overall evaluation, intervention (Prevention, Repair, Upgrade, and
Rehabilitation) could be done if required. For the evaluation purpose grading of the structure for
different components are performed with preset judgment criteria (as in Figure 3). For this different
maintenance and rehabilitation, codes should be used according to the nature of the work.
 Figure 2: Two step inspection (Reference: Lecture note)

Figure 3: Comprehensive evaluation (Reference: Lecture note)

Hence, as discussed above, maintenance engineer should follow a series of maintenance procedure
based on life cycle management concept and should focus on the following major points:

1. Preparation of maintenance program

2. Standardized inspection of current status of the facilities
3. Evaluation of residual performance and prediction of future performance degradation of the
structure or components based on inspection results
4. Comprehensive evaluation using future facility use plan, remaining service period and life
cycle cost of the facilities
5. Implementation of necessary countermeasure works based on the comprehensive evaluation.