Maintenance planning is very different from planning of other infrastructure projects. The goal of maintenance is to sustain the life of assets or provision of a service at the minimum possible costs. When maintenance is carried out too soon or too late, the provider of the assets/infrastructure impairs unnecessary costs. When the supply of maintenance does not meet its demand, assets (services) deteriorate and may cause accidents. The provider may have to interrupt the use of the assets/services or even loose its property. Replacement costs of property almost always exceed the sum of the maintenance costs and the interruption of the services associated with the assets causes all sorts of costs to the society and possibly the environment. The additional expenditures due to inappropriate planning of maintenance activities and insufficient allocation of maintenance funds could have been used to finance other projects addressing social, economic and environmental concerns.

When projects addressing social, economic or environmental concerns are delayed due to shortage of funds they do not increase the financial burden for the government. In other words, delays of these projects do not result in unnecessary expenditures for the government.

Some may argue that maintenance projects should compete for funding with projects that addresses social, economic or environmental concerns. However on the long run this approach result in failure of existing assets and existing services will have to be discontinued. Thus effectively this approach is not a comparison between a given maintenance project and a project addressing social, economic or environmental concerns, but is a comparison between the cost and benefits associated with discontinuing an existing asset and its services with projects creating new or improving assets (new road or reformed road). The cost-benefit analysis should be based on incremental life-cycle analysis. To learn all about Maintenance Planning, read Designing Maintenance Control Systems.

Designing Maintenance Control Systems (983 kB)

Road Maintenance Models (1333 kB)

Maintenance of Road Structures (785 kB)

Maintenance of Small Water Supply, Sanitation & Irrigation Schemes (359 kB)

Maintaining Sewer Systems (251 kB)

http://www.lifewater.org/wfw/wfwindex.htm

The US Army Corps of Engineers provide excellent guidelines for designing operation and maintenance manuals for water supply system. Please consult their document "Operation and Maintenance: Water Supply Systems, Unified Facilities Criteria", which can be downloaded from various websites, among which:

http://www.wbdg.org/ccb/DOD/UFC/ufc_3_230_02.pdf

http://www.pdhonline.org/courses/c132/c132.pdf