Prototyping a domain-task ontology for facilitating strategic decisions of asset managers of public sewerage systems

Prototyping a domain-task ontology for facilitating strategic decisions of asset managers of public sewerage systems

Barekas, Apostolis (TU Delft Civil Engineering & Geosciences)

Wamelink, J.W.F. (graduation committee)
van Nederveen, G.A. (mentor)
Bektas, K.E. (graduation committee)
van den Berg, Marijn (graduation committee)
Raghavendra Rao, Shreenidhi (graduation committee)

Delft University of Technology

Delft University of Technology

Civil Engineering | Construction Management and Engineering

2022-12-20

The current research stems from the motivation of reducing the information loss that asset managers face in the operation & maintenance phase of the project. Most of the public infrastructure assets’ condition nowadays deteriorate due to ageing and municipalities confront challenges to manage their portfolios effectively by adopting proactive management strategies. To succeed the highest possible value from assets, asset management is being adopted as an industry practice in the Dutch construction sector. Successfully managing assets requires managers at the handover stage to acquire accurate, explicit, and complete information from the earlier stages (Design and Construction phase). Only with reliable information they can make the right decisions about costs, performance, and risks which are the pillars of asset management theory. However, the information in the operations stage is incomplete or invalid and dispersed in various sources. This is an obstacle to reuse knowledge as asset managers have to identify information from various sources leading to secondary costs. Significant barriers are the asset managers' limited involvement from the project's beginning. That makes their needs less explicit for contractors and reduces the level of understanding of what information they have to deliver. This thesis works towards providing a more reusable and flexible method in the construction industry for capturing and structuring the strategic information needs of asset managers in a machine and human-understandable way. Linked data and semantic web technologies were used to capture and structure the information and create an ontology. In conclusion, the research demonstrated a way of identifying, capturing and structuring asset information needs with which users can communicate effectively using a common language. The ontology aggregates and stores information from diverse sources and enhance the communication between parties by providing them a common understanding given the specific scope. In this way, the information needs of asset managers can be explicitly defined from the beginning of a project, resulting to complete and reusable information. Now the understanding of what information has to be transferred to asset managers is more straightforward, reusable and unambiguous, resulting in reduced time retrieval of information and secondary costs (e.g. looking for information).

Asset management
Public Sewerage Systems
Information Technology
Knowledge Management

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:5cbaf29a-bd03-4922-b25a-4fc60a1ffb13

Student theses

master thesis

© 2022 Apostolis Barekas