Sustainable management of infrastructures using risks

Today, maintenance costs of industrial infrastructures are growing up continuously. It is thus necessary to have a general and systematic method allowing to hierarchize the investment priorities in order to optimize the benefits. Taking into account the diversity of infrastructures, components and stakes, such a task is far to be easy. However, methods are implementing in the civil engineering world in order to give help to engineers and decision-makers to jointly develop strategies answering their technical, financial or environmental problems. Oxand, a counsel company of the Electricite de France (EdF) group, has developed and implemented a decisive decision-help tool. By combining the notion of risk with social, financial or environmental impacts, it becomes possible to estimate and compare different activities submitted to exploitation, safety and budget constraints. Moreover, it is possible to introduce the time dimension in the analysis by the integration of the most recent knowledge on materials aging, still with the aim of an optimized technical and financial management. This article presents the concepts of this methodology and its applications in particular in the domain of nuclear industry. (J.S.)