Elsevier

Journal of Cleaner Production

Volume 142, Part 4, 20 January 2017, Pages 1693-1709
Journal of Cleaner Production

Optimal sustainable life cycle maintenance strategies for port infrastructures

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.11.120Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Improving sustainability of maintenance strategies for port infrastructures.

  • A Markov chain model with randomized transition probabilities is developed.

  • Provide more reliable information on the maintenance timing.

  • Take into account various uncertainties associated with infrastructure deterioration process.

Abstract

Port operations are highly important in the central economic and industrial regions which rely heavily on the use of port infrastructures. An economic and efficient maintenance strategy is essential to govern the normal running of port infrastructures and thus seaborne transportation. Many agencies worldwide have managed to develop maintenance strategies to ensure optimal levels of serviceability and safety for port infrastructures. However, there is not much information about how sustainable issues can be implemented in the maintenance planning. This paper proposes a methodology for evaluating, comparing and improving sustainability of maintenance strategies for port infrastructures. The method is developed based on a proposed randomized structural deterioration model. The costs due to retrofitting, operating loss and environmental loss are considered in the total life cycle cost estimation. The concept of utility function is utilized to serve as a criterion for finding the optimal strategy among the alternative maintenance strategies. An investigation is performed on a Tokyo wharf to demonstrate the proposed approach. The maintenance strategies for different structural elements in the port infrastructures are discussed. The results show that the proposed approach can provide more reliable information on the maintenance timing. The predicted cost bounds allow owners/risk managers to understand the current condition of the structure in several ways, which include both safe-side prediction and average prediction.

Introduction

Seaport, being a linkage between land and seaborne transport, plays an essential role in facilitating global trade and economic development. Ports handle 80% of trade and provide many strategic areas for fishing and cruise activities all over the world (Boéro et al., 2009). Therefore, port stability needs to be fully analyzed in the context of risk management since it has a crucial role in providing various kinds of services. The performance of infrastructure is especially a key concern in retaining the stability of port operations. However, a lot of port infrastructures are highly deteriorated. It was reported that the majority of ports (60%) were built before 1955 and many significant damages have been noticed by the port surveyors (Rosquoët et al., 2006). Structural safety is of paramount importance for the port infrastructure during its entire lifetime. As aggressive environment conditions such as hurricane and corrosion can cause a reduction in the port structural functionality, the timely maintenance of port infrastructure performance is necessary to ensure the normal operation of port (Strogen et al., 2016).

Generally, the importance of port infrastructure maintenance can be viewed in three aspects. First, most port infrastructures need to be utilized for a very long period of time. During the whole service time of a port, structural deteriorations can always exist. For this reason, maintenance work is a long term job which aims to keep the lifetime risk below a target level. Second, port infrastructures are normally built along the coastal areas which demands frequent repair and retrofit works. As most port infrastructures are directly exposed to a harsh environment, a fast deterioration mechanism is usually expected in the constructed facilities. For example, the chloride-induced corrosion is a primary cause of most reinforced concrete structures in onshore marine environment (Zhang, 2015a). There is a need for effective and economic maintenance planning for these fast deteriorated structures. Third, the consequences associated with port infrastructure failure due to insufficient maintenance can be enormous which may bring adverse impacts on the society. It should be realized that a disruption at ports is not only a loss on the ports, but also a possible stoppage of the whole supply chain (Zhang and Lam, 2016). In other words, the condition of infrastructural performance affects the efficiency of port operations and associated sectors. It is therefore essential to provide accurate consideration during the initial design of the port infrastructures, as well as to conduct appropriate maintenance since their services start.

In general, many studies have been conducted on infrastructure maintenance planning and strategy development. Most of these former works focus on the minimization of structural risks due to constrained maintenance budget (Frangopol and Soliman, 2016, Khan and Tee, 2016). To arrive at an appropriate solution, the economic evaluation is usually integrated with structural performance measures such as reliability, redundancy and risks (Zabalza Bribian et al., 2009, Tee et al., 2014). However, very little work can be found in maintenance strategies specifically focusing on sustainable development. Recent studies show that ports can be a contributor to global anthropogenic emissions (Lam and Lai, 2015, Khan and Tee, 2015). Ports face many increasing challenges from social, economic and environmental factors which create significant impacts on port performance and management (Zhang and Lam, 2015a, Zhang and Lam, 2015b). Furthermore, environmental considerations have raised many regulatory control and social responsibility that port planners and operators have to fulfill (Chau et al., 2015). Attaining the economic performance alone is no longer sufficient for the long term maintenance development. However, there is very little research addressing the sustainable issues in infrastructure planning and development. Literature in sustainable maintenance strategies for port infrastructures is even more limited, or almost non-existent.

When assessing the safety of an existing port infrastructure, the uncertainties associated with the structural deterioration process are quite troublesome. The Markov chain model is a widely applied technique in the performance assessment for deteriorating structures (Straub and Faber, 2005). It has such a feature that the structural deterioration process can be characterized by the transition probabilities from one condition state to another. In this respect, many engineering industries tend to implement this technology in their maintenance management, for example geotechnical analysis (Bommer et al., 2010), wind engineering (Sorensen, 2009), bridge engineering (Frangopol et al., 2008) and coastal management (Yang et al., 2013). However, the Markov chain model requires a large amount of inspected data to formulate its transition probability matrix. If only limited amount of data is provided, the obtained Markov chain model could generate large errors in the structural condition predictions. Moreover, the probability transition matrix in the Markov chain model can hardly be modeled as deterministic as most deterioration process is stochastic. The use of single transition probability matrix in Markov chain model might not be accurate and misleading. This study aims to develop a reliable structural deterioration model that can predict the long term performance of port infrastructures. This is achieved by formulating a randomized Markov chain model and its associated simulation approach for characterizing the port infrastructure deterioration process. A theoretical and empirical study is conducted to illustrate and validate the proposed approach.

The paper is organized as follows. After the introduction, Section 2 will provide an overview of the existing research works and techniques regarding port maintenance. Section 3 then presents the framework about how sustainability is incorporated in the port infrastructure maintenance planning. The steps of conducting the structural inspections and measurement are introduced in Section 4. A randomized Markov chain model in characterizing the structural deterioration mechanism for the port structural elements is elaborated in Section 5. The model includes the random variability of the deterioration process and environmental conditions. Sections 6 Life cycle cost estimations, 7 Decision making based on utility function detail the cost evaluation methods and decision making criteria for the port infrastructure maintenance strategies. Section 8 presents the results with the demonstration of a case study as example. The comparison of different maintenance scenarios is also discussed. Finally, Section 9 provides the concluding remarks of this study.

Section snippets

Literature review

Research on port maintenance is generally rather limited. Some have incorporated port maintenance as one of the factors for considerations in their study especially in the area of terminal operation optimization, for example, Hess and Hess (2010) and Ee et al. (2014). Among others, structural engineering and maintenance is one of the key research focuses. Tsinker (2004) provided a comprehensive discussion on deterioration of waterfront structure due to both external natural environment and

Framework of developing sustainable maintenance strategies for port infrastructures

In order to derive optimal sustainable maintenance strategies for port infrastructures, it is important to know how sustainable issues can be incorporated in the structural maintenance planning. Normally, the structural maintenance planning is based on a complete structural performance assessment with a full evaluation of all the economic costs. A rational and efficient maintenance procedure needs to be developed based on the life-cycle management concept (Ortiz et al., 2009, Tsai and Chang,

Inspection and measurement

The initial step in the maintenance planning is to monitor all the port infrastructure elements. In the first step of the framework, the performance of the port infrastructure elements including current health condition, initial condition and service time are necessarily identified. The information of initial and current health conditions could provide the extent of deterioration occurred in the structural elements. Following the deterioration theorem, the physical deterioration model for the

A randomized Markov chain deterioration model

The best way to determine and improve the prediction of future performance of deteriorated structure is through a simulation study. Markov chain model is proved to be an efficient and widely applied simulation approach for various engineering deteriorating structures in the literature (Saydam and Frangopol, 2015, Fang et al., 2016). In a Markov chain model, the structural deterioration process is considered as structural state changes over discrete time intervals. The transition from one state

Life cycle cost estimations

The deterioration model provides the necessary information for the time of performing the maintenance works. If these maintenance actions can be expressed in monetary terms then an optimal planning or decision will be the one that minimizes the life cycle cost of the investigated port infrastructure. Generally, the overall cost resulted from maintenance activities can be classified into three categories, namely, costs due to retrofitting, operating loss and environmental loss.

Decision making based on utility function

The final challenge in the port infrastructure maintenance planning development is to find out the best strategy among all the optional maintenance strategies. To achieve an optimal maintenance strategy, a consistent criterion for measuring the benefit of a maintenance program should be established. The formulation of a utility function can be employed to provide the decision maker the information of the relative value for different maintenance strategies. The maintenance strategy that has a

Case study – Tokyo port

To demonstrate the proposed framework, the port infrastructure of Tokyo is assessed for its long term maintenance planning in the following investigation. The selected infrastructure is an open-type wharf lying in the Tokyo bay. It was built in 1977 and began its service in 1979. The wharf is designed for a water depth of 12 m with the main purpose of automobile export. The total length is about 300 m which aims to provide service to vessel with the size up to 35000 DWT. Main components in all

Conclusions

In this research, a methodology for sustainable assessment and optimization of maintenance strategies for port infrastructures is developed. A Markov chain model with randomized transition probabilities is proposed and developed to model the port infrastructural deteriorations. The cost regarding sustainable issues is considered and counted in the total estimations for maintenance actions. It is found that the developed randomized Markov chain model is more flexible to quantify the

Acknowledgments

This study is partly sponsored by Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) for the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) under the project No. 16H04398. The first author, Yi Zhang, is sponsored by “The JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship for Foreign Researchers” Program. Such financial aids are gratefully acknowledged.

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