Decision support system (DSS) for facilities rehabilitation and management (part 2): development of optimized intervention strategy

Purpose

This paper (Part 2 of 2) aims to expand the previously developed performance assessment model (PAM) into a decision support system (DSS) to produce optimized decisions on rehabilitation of facilities.

Design/methodology/approach

The research includes a comprehensive PAM that integrates analytical hierarchy process-multi attribute utility theory methods for the physical, operational, and environmental aspects of the mosque, as described in Part 1 of the study. An optimized intervention tool is added to the PAM to complete the DSS development. The tool determines the optimum maintenance decisions that are in line with the budget and condition criticality. The deterioration measures are created using a deterministic straight-line extrapolation technique, and the intervention actions used in the optimization are specified through literature review and in-depth interviews with 11 experts. The optimization model was simplified into a user-friendly visual basic application and applied to an existing facility case study depicting its useful functionality.

Findings

The optimization model recommendation of interventions recovered the overall condition rating index (CRI) of the facility while maintaining budget constraints. The CRI in the first approach (minimum budget to achieve acceptable overall performance) was improved from 6.5 to 7.76, costing 275,850 SAR. While the second approach (Maximum recovery with a selected budget constraint, 300,000 SAR in this case) CRI was improved from 6.5 to 8.3, costing 299,850 SAR.

Originality/value

The presented DSS in this paper offers a tool that enables the rehabilitation and overall management of any facility by its managers. The DSS can also be further customized to fit the facility manager’s specific strategies and achieve desired objectives.