Author(s): F. Pardo-Bosch; A. Aguado

Linked Author(s):

Keywords: Sustainability; Decision-making; MIVES; MCDM; Dams; Prioritization

Abstract: From immemorial time, dams have contributed significantly for the progress of civilizations. For this reason, nowadays, there is a vast engineering heritage. Over the years, these infrastructures can present some ordinary maintenance issues associated with their normal operation or with ageing processes. Normally, these problems do not represent an important risk for the structure, but they have to be attended. To do it, owners of dams have to finance many ordinary interventions. As it is impossible to carry out all of them at the same time, managers have to make a decision and select the most “important” ones. However, it is not easy because interventions usually have very different natures (for example: repair a bottom outlet, change gates, seal a crack...) and because they cannot use a classical risk analysis for these type of interventions. Authors, who are aware this problem, present, in this paper, a multi-criteria decision-making system to prioritize these interventions with the aim of providing engineers a useful tool, with which they can order the interventions from the most important to the last. To do it, authors have used MIVES. This tool defines the Prioritization Index for the Management of Hydraulic Structures (PIMHS), which assesses, in two indivisible phases, the contribution to sustainability of each intervention. The first phase measures the damage of the dam, and the second one measures the social, environmental and economic impacts. At the end of the paper, it is presented a case of study where some interventions are evaluated with PIMHS.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15142/T3700628160853

Year: 2016