Themes

Drawing on nine years of CIEAM collaboration experience to frame research outputs that maximise operational efficiency and sustainability, the Asset Institute has developed a broad work plan designed to predict and identify potential challenges facing the asset management field in order for the Institute to connect partners to find innovative solutions to real problems.

Factoring in a high degree of flexibility to ensure our research is relevant, the Asset Institute will focus on a number of core areas or ‘themes’ to meet specific needs as they arise, taking unique asset challenges and matching them with leading experts to develop innovative solutions. The themes build on the strengths that positioned CIEAM as a world leader in solving asset management and sustainability problems and encompass:

• Design and Construction
  Expenditure on infrastructure and buildings comprises a large proportion of a nation’s investment each year, both for the construction of new assets and the operation, repair and maintenance of existing assets. These assets are a “hidden” cost on the economy which has a direct effect on national and international competitiveness. It is essential that these assets be procured and maintained in as efficient a manner as possible. The goal of this theme is to identify ways in which built assets can meet the needs of the owners/stewards of these assets to increase their productivity, through the development of asset systems that provide information through the lifecycle of an asset and feed this information forward to the procurement process so that new assets can gain the benefits of these learnings. The deliverables from this theme will include the development of methods to support the procurement and operation of assets, and the implementation of IT tools to assist industry in their adoption.

• Organisation and Planning
  The Organisation and Planning theme will undertake applied research to determine the requisite strategy, planning, organisational structures and institutional arrangements required to successfully acquire and manage high value assets in a complex technical environment, and to achieve the full potential of technological and engineering outputs. The program will develop a suite of methodologies to enable asset managers to better develop and utilise the capacity of their current and future workforce taking into account their unique demographic and professional profiles.

• Integration and Interoperability
  Effective asset management depends critically on accurate and timely access to data and information; yet the ever increasing volumes and variety of data is challenging modern asset management organisations. This theme offers capability in the technological, systems and organisational aspects for delivering consistent, timely and high quality information about assets and their management through not only the integration of internal systems but access to valuable information from external information repositories. This theme’s specialists have expert skills in developing integrated data models and architectures, Asset Information Models (AIM) and tools, information management and quality systems, as well as big data infrastructure and exploitation.

• Asset Health and Analytics
  Utilising the models/algorithm libraries and advanced asset management decision support tools that have been established from ten years’ of leading research in CIEAM, the Asset Health and Analytics (AHA) theme is able to develop new applications in a timely fashion for a wide variety of assets and businesses in the area of asset health management and risk based multi-criteria optimal decisions. Our multi-disciplinary team of specialists, a rare combination of different engineering researchers, statisticians, computer scientists and software developers has deep knowledge in dealing with challenging infrastructure and engineering asset issues offering intelligent solutions using big data analytics, health prediction, and life cycle decision support simulation models.

• Recovery and Continuity
  This theme will define suitable approaches to designing and implementing effective recovery and continuity management practices for assets and infrastructure systems in concentrated locations and dispersed geographically. Specifically, it will create knowledge to enhance the ability of owner/operators of such systems to maintain operational functionality when impacted by major disturbances and generate rapid recovery of reduced capability.

• Sustainability and Resilience
  Building on world-leading research undertaken by CIEAM, the Sustainability and Resilience Research Theme will create knowledge to strengthen design and management strategies to enhance the resilience of assets from systematic deterioration of serviceability as well as from natural disasters. Specifically, the Research Theme will focus on developing a triple bottom line approach to ensure asset sustainability and to prevent loss of asset function which will adversely impact on service delivery to customers and the environment. The Research Theme brings together specialists with proven expertise in the areas of climate change adaptation, life cycle costing and designing for sustainability and resilience.

• Learning and Development
  Through our plans to implement training and development initiatives, we strive to convey the outputs of our activities which encompass all our themes to allow learners of asset management to explore and utilise the knowledge in the workplace or institution. To enable an effective transfer of knowledge to learners, the Asset Institute adopts a flexible approach in the delivery of such knowledge and resources through online and face to face modes.

The Asset Institute will continually develop its areas of expertise, drawing on previous CIEAM outputs where applicable to deliver enhanced economic, social and environmental outcomes for our stakeholders, for example outputs such as: AMCaMM, an asset management capability maturity model that assists organisations to assess their current asset management capabilities and identify where they want to be in the future; mathematical models that underpin decision support tools; LinEAR, an engineering asset renewal tool which provides integrated analysis and methodology to achieve optimal maintenance and renewal decisions.