The construction industry in the Netherlands is taking numerous measures throughout the industry to achieve the possible reduction of CO2 emission or GHG emissions by 2050 to become carbon neutral. Based on the current situation the major focus is usually on the production and construction phase of a building or a civil infrastructure. To meet the requirements to minimize CO2 emissions, the municipalities and the stakeholders involved in the maintenance phase of civil structures have to improve the emission reduction process. This can be made possible if the quantification of the CO2 emission is improvised from the current status and focuses only on the maintenance activities alone.

The results of the research are obtained from the developed information model. The information model allows the user to estimate the CO2 emissions from the maintenance activities of the assets located in a municipality. The data obtained from the estimation of CO2 is used in the dashboard of the information model to visualize and compare the data in terms of different criteria like building materials, size of the assets, location of the assets, heavy machinery usage, etc. This way, the decisions can be made by the involved stakeholders in asset management in the strategies of the maintenance planning of the assets or the overall municipality.

This information model can add value to the existing life cycle applications since the maintenance or the usage phase emission is redefined and the necessary scope for maintenance is added to the existing scope. The consultants, asset owners/managers can monitor the CO2 emission from the maintenance activities specifically and can take any measures with the output data available from the information model. This information model currently quantifies the CO2 emission from the minor maintenance activities of the assets in a municipality. With this information, the next step can lead to optimizing the CO2 emission with other criteria like time and cost for the entire Municipality.

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).