Abstract

Effective through-life management of physical assets is essential for any asset-intensive organization to reach and maintain sustainable levels of growth and value creation. One of the challenges that has to be faced to achieve such objective is to improve the quantification process of costs, in order for organizations to be able to evaluate the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of their asset and to use it as a support for informed decision making. TCO is gaining increasing relevance both in industry and in the scientific research. Global competition is now forcing asset-intensive organizations to estimate and optimize the overall system life cycle cost with reference to performance, safety, reliability and maintainability (R&M), hence there is an increasing awareness in industry of the importance of evaluating costs throughout the life of an asset. It is evident that a TCO model needs to link engineering issues, such as the evaluation of the state and performances of an asset along its life cycle to economic concepts in order to become a reliable support for decision making in asset management. Nevertheless, up to day, there are still a number of difficulties that limit a TCO model widespread adoption by industry and there is no single model that has been accepted as a standard. In the seminar the aim is to present the PhD research work by Irene Roda that is being carried out within the research activity at the Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering at Politecnico di Milano with regards to the performance-driven evaluation of the Total Cost of Ownership of industrial assets. The objective of the research activities is to identify and overcome the currently existing limitations for the development of a TCO model that can be widely used for decision making in asset management. In particular, the main research question is: how to integrate physical asset’s state & performances analysis into economic evaluations within a TCO model that can be used by asset managers as a decision-making support. Under development research activities and implemented application cases in industry will be presented.