Condition assessment methodologies for maintenance and repair decisions

Abstract

Structures like embankment dams gradually deteriorate with time. For safety reasons, among others, those structures have to be maintained. However, the institutions responsible for those structures, like the Corps of Engineers, or Hydro-Quebec, have limited funding to carry out those repairs. Therefore, there is a need to optimize the allocation of the funds, so as to make the most judicious repairs possible. The research described herein was triggered by the concern of the decision makers, that the most judicious repairs were not always carried out with the available funds. The purpose of this thesis is to present a new decision making tool, interaction matrices, and to compare their use to that of other tools that have been used in the past for condition assessment. This comparison has led to the conclusion that interaction matrices are a tool that can actually decrease the subjectivity involved when experts compare the importance of the different functions of the components needing to be repaired on an embankment dam. The methodology is applied to the case of monitoring devices.