This special issue is devoted to the subject of political and related societal issues associated with the use of life-cycle concepts for civil infrastructure systems. It consists of six papers that are expanded and reviewed versions selected from the ten papers at two special sessions of the International Conference on Bridge Maintenance, Safety and Management. The first of these sessions was entitled Political and Other Societal Issues of Life-Cycle Costing, and the second was Politics and Perception in Life-Cycle Decisions.
The concepts of life-cycle analysis are based on the optimal consideration of a structure over its intended lifetime, including design, construction, operation, inspection, maintenance and repair. Infrastructure systems are often owned and operated by a government agency, and, as such, are public structures. It is well documented that society responds primarily to current expenditures, conveniences and risks, and that discounting methods do not adequately take this bias into account. There is a clear incompatibility related to the fact that political election cycles are an order of magnitude shorter than design lifetimes of infrastructure. Various aspects related to actual and perceived risk, societal decision-making, and tradeoff strategies of current versus future costs are covered in the papers selected for this special issue.
There are clear advantages of utilizing a life-cycle cost analysis for the selection of project and design alternatives for public infrastructure. Adoption of such an approach, however, has been relatively slow and uneven, and this may be largely due to those political and social issues that are generally not considered in an engineering cost-benefit analysis. In addition, there seem to be differing degrees of implementation among countries. Engineering analysts and risk professionals will see increased acceptance of their recommendations if they have a clearer understanding of the array of factors facing agency and publicly elected decision makers. This special issue has the goal of bringing a broad perspective of these considerations to the readership.
The first two papers, Implications of the long term bridge performance program for life cycle costing in the United States by Chase and Ghasemi, and Societal and reliability aspects of bridge management in the Netherlands by Klatter, Vrouwenvelder and van Noortwijk, provide views of the contrasting political and social pressures for life-cycle analysis of bridge management in the two countries. The US has had a bridge inspection program for 35 years and is engaged in building upon this for a Long-Term Bridge Performance Program. The Netherlands has implemented a decision-theoretic that incorporates societal perspectives for management of the bridge network. The third paper, Governing issues and alternative resolutions for a highway transportation agency's transition to asset management by Moon, Aktan, Furuta and Dogaki, presents an in-depth analysis of the real-world issues related to transitioning to a full asset management approach to transportation infrastructure. In the fourth paper, A budget management approach for societal infrastructure projects, Nishijima and Faber provide an alternative approach for allocation of limited funding for candidate projects incorporating direct and consequent benefits and costs. Thoft-Christensen explains many of the practical difficulties of life-cycle management for structures, bridges and nuclear installations in the fifth paper Life-Cycle Cost-Benefit (LCCB) analysis of bridges from a user and social point of view. Finally, in the sixth paper, Societal issues in adopting life-cycle concepts within the political system, I describe some of the social theoretic concepts that affect the replacement of least initial cost by life-cycle decision principles.