Heuristic Optimization Model for Infrastructure Asset Management

Abstract

In developed countries, the need of infrastructure maintenance is becoming an important issue because their infrastructures have been built up progressively over the last 100 years or longer. Moreover, users are increasingly demanding in in terms of quality, comfort, and safety. Under this scenario, infrastructure managers seek to optimize each monetary unit invested in maintenance, thus ensuring that funds allocated to the best alternative. This paper presents a heuristic model for solving the budget allocation problem with the implementation of a Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithm. An illustrative example is undertaken, analyzing the effect of budgetary restrictions in infrastructure performance. It can be concluded that infrastructure performance show a good parabolic correlation with available budget.