Total-Package-Prioritization Mitigation Strategy for Deferred Maintenance of a Campus-Sized Institution

Abstract

Deferred maintenance (DeM) backlogs can accelerate facility deterioration, which can cause buildings to reach demolition conditions prematurely. Although higher-education institutions allocate DeM costs to the budget, they lack a strategic decision-making process to address the DeM backlog issue. This paper provides a new paradigm to evaluate and diagnose the DeM requirements at the system, subsystem, and component levels. The proposed total-package-prioritization (TPP) mitigation strategy for the DeM consists of five phases: (1) building selection, (2) system evaluation, (3) DeM component evaluation, (4) DeM subsystem model evaluation, and (5) total subsystem evaluation. The key performance factor was reliability, to evaluate the facility condition at the different levels. Probabilistic risk assessments, including fault tree analysis and Bayesian network analysis, were applied to develop the TPP. A case study was conducted as part of this research to validate the proposed framework with 188 DeM components. After the execution of the TPP, Facility Condition Index (FCI) values for the selected buildings were decreased below target value of 0.1, which is considered good condition for the FCI. Therefore, the proposed TPP mitigation strategy for DeM backlogs can help not only in systematically diagnosing the conditions of a building from component to the system level, but can also improve cost-effective budget allocation by improving the FCI value of a building.