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The lack of smart resources management and servicescape strategies within the social housing sector in the late 1970s influenced the rise of successive Governments to consider the restructuring of the traditional ‘cumbersome’ Local Authority based structures and approaches toward more ‘enterprise focussed’ management organisations (Sharp & Jones 2012). This change in central Government policy encouraged Local Authorities to assign through outsourcing their housing stock (including associated asset management services) as part of a Large Scale Voluntary Transfer (LSVT) via a process of compulsory competitive tendering to Housing Associations and/or set up Housing Trusts to increase the accountability, efficiency, and effectiveness of social housing and healthcare provision in the local community. As part of this modernisation process, all social housing and community care providers (also known as ‘Registered Social Landlords’ - RSLs) became subject to statutory audits, inspections and regulation, and performance management, to ensure the service quality delivery requirements. More recently, however, changes in the legislative framework have introduced choice-based letting policy, putting the customer first, service delivery and additionally RSLs are required to act as ‘Corporate Social Landlords’. These changes have focused RSLs attention on the need to sharpen service responsiveness, especially in the area of housing maintenance management (DETR 2000). Previous research (Holmes 1985; Spedding 1990; Johnston 1993; Stewart & Stoker 1995; Olubodun 1996, 2000, 2001; Sagoo et al. 1996; El-Haram & Horner 2002; Kangwa & Olubodun 2003, 2005; Boussabaine & Kirkham 2004; Jones & Cooper 2007; Prowle 2009; Babangida et al. 2012) has mainly concentrated on analysing maintenance management factors at the micro level; developing maintenance models and framework design for operational level. However, in the social housing sector, there have been no studies undertaken to date that have been focused on housing maintenance strategies – for example, how this is formulated, the key drivers of change and the impact on customer orientated service delivery. The purpose of this study is to identify the critical factors that drive the decision-making process in order to formulate responsive housing maintenance strategies and to develop a decision support model to improve customer service delivery of social housing provision. Research methodology Through a process of qualitative case study, pilot questionnaire surveys, workshops and qualitative in-depth interviews, the research has identified how the housing maintenance strategies are formulated and how social housing providers could enhance customer service delivery. The study comprised four phases in order to reflect the key objectives of the research. The first phase comprised a review of literature on social housing provision in the UK, identifying relevant changes in the legislative framework, an assessment of the challenges faced by RSLs and the key factors influencing performance of social housing provision. This phase also included undertaking a case study based on five different RSLs to examine the ‘real problems’ as to how and to what extent RSLs have adopted their organisation in order to meet the changes and challenges which they now face. The second phase investigated the key service factors impacting on housing maintenance strategy design and development through the use of a pilot study questionnaire directed to the asset managers (participating in the survey) and also included a selection of end users of the services (tenants). This phase identified the differences between the perceptions of service providers and the expectations of the service users. A key feature of this phase entailed conducting a workshop to disseminate findings of the pilot study. The workshop also formed a basis for ‘in-depth’ discussions for identifying the key factors, their descriptions, their interactions with each other, their inter-relationships with the tenant type, and their combined impact on formulating responsive housing maintenance strategy. The third phase of the study entailed eliciting qualitative data from the participants using the Repertory Grid (RG) ‘in-depth’ interview technique - a psychology tool in order to gain a deeper understanding of the core important ‘constructs’ and sub-constructs, their characteristics, their inter-relationships in the design and development of effective housing asset maintenance strategies. The fourth phase of this study entailed the development of a decision support system and the qualitative validation of the relationships found to exist between the constructs examined in phase three together with the testing of the model over a period of two months with four of the participating social housing providers. Findings The key findings arising from this research suggest that the design and development of value for money maintenance strategies within the public housing sector, are not solely based on physical factors related to the age, condition, location, construction type for example, but rather it was found that the majority of the asset management decisions made, were dependent upon a multivariate of key factors. The study identified 52 key factors, which when grouped together formed seven key cluster (Customer risk factors, Asset manager risk factors, Tenancy risk factors, Neighbourhood and community sustainability risk factors, Financial and economic risk factors, continuous service improvement risk factors and corporate risk factors) which are both ‘unique’ and ‘novel’ and are identified as having a direct influence on the formulation of housing maintenance strategy. These factors should not be considered in isolation and are more akin to the business success factors. The business ‘Balanced Scorecard’ (BSC) was evaluated and used as the basis for a ‘best fit’ model which was tested against four RSL to confirm its validity and its appropriateness. The responses obtained from these trials has indicated that the BSC provides a working tool capable of enhancing RSL organisational capabilities and service delivery effectiveness but also able to incorporate customer views regarding service delivery. This research makes major contributions to the existing limited pool of knowledge relating to strategic asset management within social housing sector and in addition, provides an insight into how housing maintenance strategy can be developed to incorporate feedback from customers (tenants) regarding the quality and responsive service delivery. The research also demonstrates the potential value of the BSC approach to the management tool capable of generating a competitive edge in line with government policy which is currently directed towards encouraging RSLs to adopt a commercial business approach to their operations. The research also demonstrates that the adoption of a decision support system in the form of BSC has the potential to provide useful assistance to RSLs intending to move away from the traditional public sector approaches to management (a more private sector orientated) approach to their operations. The research also shows that asset managers experience little difficulty in understanding the principles behind the BSC approach and its application. In addition, the cascading effect of BSC in housing maintenance strategy means that the strategy can be converted into measurable actions at the operational levels thereby providing a direct link between strategy and its implementation. Due to the absence of suitable benchmarking data, score rating derived from the RG were adopted by asset managers. This approach was found to be highly sensitive in assessing service delivery constructs.

Saskatchewan is facing a current infrastructure deficit, that is the current resources allocated to support its infrastructure are not in line with maintaining the current level of service into the future. This deficit has lead to a common assumption that assets are more likely to fail to provide their required service with age. While obsolescence and other factors may be related to age, the present work set out to investigate the relationship between probability of failure to provide service and expected life of assets, to allow asset managers to create more robust risk management strategies as part of their asset management plans. For the present work, failure is defined as any functional failure where the asset has not met its required level of service. By the functional failure definition, a failure can be any event from a short duration service interruption to catastrophic breakdown of an asset. The purpose of the present work is to look at probability of failure, and not consequence so assets will have two states in the study, fully meeting their required level of service (function) or not meeting their required level of service (functional failure). In the 1970s, two researchers with United Airlines, Nowlan and Heap, completed a study of when assets in aviation were likely to fail. The way failure is defined in their report is in line with the failure definition in the present work. Nowlan and Heap’s work lead to classifying failures into six different patterns. The largest group of failures, known as the F pattern, show that assets were more likely to fail early in their lives. The present work employed a similar study of its assets over a 13 month period to see if similar patterns could be found. To complete the study at the Saskatoon Water Treatment Plant, asset failure data was taken from the City’s Avantis Asset Management System. Failures were broken down by asset type and sub-type based on functionality to observe their age relative to expected life when they failed. The present work determined that the approach was sound and that there was sufficient data with some types of assets to fit to the patterns developed by Nowlan and Heap. The present work shows that likelihood of failure to provide service is not connected with age, and that additional study of the Saskatoon Water Treatment Plant asset’s is required in order to determine exact patterns of probability of failure for each of the assets types. After classifying the failures by each asset type, and accounting for errors in the data caused by the warranty period on assets that are maintained by the contractor, all types of assets were found to have higher occurrences of failure in the early portion of their lives than closer to the end of their expected life. Furthermore defining the shape of each asset type failures made it clear that age-based failure was not dominant. The study results lead to the conclusion that more research should be conducted not only at the Saskatoon WTP but with other infrastructure to better understand when assets are likely to fail to provide service so that probability can be integrated with risk management programs. Lastly this study has shown that it is not correct for asset managers to assume any pattern of failure for their assets without investigation.

published_or_final_version / abstract / Architecture / Master / Master of Science in Interdisciplinary Design and Management

<p>Sound maintenance strategies and planning are of crucial importance for wind power systems, and especially for offshore locations. In the last decades, an increased awareness of the impact of human living on the environment has emerged in the world. The importance of developing renewable energy is today highly recognized and energy policies have been adopted towards this development. Wind energy has been the strongest growing renewable source of energy this last decade. Wind power is now developing offshore where sites are available and benefits from strong and steady wind. However, the initial investments are larger than onshore, and operation and maintenance costs may be substantially higher due to transportation costs for maintenance and accessibility constrained by the weather.</p><p>Operational costs can be significantly reduced by optimizing decisions for maintenance strategies and maintenance planning. This is especially important for offshore wind power systems to reduce the high economic risks related to the uncertainties on the accessibility and reliability of wind turbines.</p><p>This thesis proposes decision models for cost efficient maintenance planning and maintenance strategies for wind power systems. One model is proposed on the maintenance planning of service maintenance activities. Two models investigate the benefits of condition based maintenance strategies for the drive train and for the blades of wind turbines, respectively. Moreover, a model is proposed to optimize the inspection interval for the blade. Maintenance strategies for small components are also presented with simple models for component redundancy and age replacement.</p><p>The models are tested in case studies and sensitivity analyses are performed for parameters of interests. The results show that maintenance costs can be significantly reduced through optimizing the maintenance strategies and the maintenance planning.</p>

As social scientists have become increasingly aware of the welfare implications of firms' locations in space there has been a considerable amount of renewed interest in the issues pertaining to the geography of price. In the short time since Hay and Johnston (1980) lamented the insufficient attention being given to the theoretical background of geographic pricing, there has been impressive amounts of progress in certain analytical areas. However, within this bulk of literature, we still know remarkably little about the determinants of geographic price variation in spatial markets containing numerous sellers (firms) and buyers (consumers). Perhaps this should not be surprising given that much of the current research is being carried out by economists (who generally tend to emphasize market process in classically constructed structural-conduct-performance modes) rather than geographers (who tend to emphasize market description and locational patterns/properties arising from spatially defined economic and behavioral market processes). This dissertation focuses on geographic price variations in competitive oligopolies, where firms react under alternative pricing conjectures/strategies. Using computer aided simulation, the analytics of equilibrium price levels are examined in one-dimensional bounded and unbounded markets to uncover the algebraic properties of spatial markets, the effects of firm density, firm location, and demand elasticity on prices, the perversities associated with consumer-related transportation costs, and the distorting effects of mixed or asymmetrical rivals' pricing strategies. The modeling of spatial price competition is regarded as essential in the evaluation of equilibrium price as a function of boundary complications, market description, and the spatial arrangement of interdependent rivals. Long-run implications of spatial price competition are discussed with the intention of developing a model (beyond the scope of this dissertation) that not only recognizes rivals' price reactions, but also stresses locationally competitive strategies. Some empirical evidence on the nature of spatial price dependence amongst rival food chains in a metropolitan area is also examined.

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Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited. / The USS Winston S. Churchill (DDG-81) shock trial was conducted in May and June of 2001 off the coast of Naval Station Mayport, Florida. Because the USS Winston S. Churchill best represented the new line of Flight II-A Arleigh Burkes, it was chosen to undergo ship shock trials for its class. These trials are necessary in order to evaluate the vulnerability and survivability of the hull and the mission essential equipment in a "combat shock environment". However, shock trials are very expensive, require extensive planning and coordination, and represent a potential hazard to the marine environment and its mammals. Computer modeling and simulation are showing themselves to be a plausible alternative in investigating the dynamic response of a ship under these shock trials conditions. This thesis investigates the use of computer ship and fluid modeling, coupled with underwater explosion simulation and compares it to actual shock trial data from the USS Winston S. Churchill. Of particular concern in this study is the amount of fluid that must be modeled to accurately capture the structural response of a full ship finite element model. Four fluid meshes were constructed and used to study the ship's response to an underwater explosion. Each simulation data was analyzed to determine which mesh best represented the actual ship shock trial results. / Lieutenant, United States Navy