PIANC Smart Rivers 2022

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Increased demand for housing across regional Australia, driven by people moving away from cities into regional centres in 2020 and 2021, is also likely to be followed by an increase in infrastructure spending in those regions.  As Australia begins to grapple with challenges of post-pandemic economic recovery made more exigent by rising inflation globally, maximising value for money spent on building new infrastructure may be key for governments in their pitch to voters.  However, at least some of this new infrastructure will have to be built at locations with little to no access for conventional construction machinery; river crossings along hiking tracks and canoe launching facilities are some examples.  Maximising value for money spent on industrially inaccessible sites, especially in the context of Australia’s strict environmental protection regulations, requires wholistic design solutions and efficient asset management practices including gathering, keeping and using asset condition data to make evidence-based decisions.

In this paper, some challenges associated with industrially inaccessible river crossings and canoe launching facilities are addressed.  It is hoped that in addition to improving value for money on such projects in Australia and other developed countries, design and asset management solutions offered in this paper contribute to improved investment outcomes for under-developed countries as well.  It is important to note that pieces of infrastructure such as footbridges or jetties that address demand for recreation in developed countries may prove even more consequential in under-developed countries because they can make an outsized contribution to local economic activity.

Design solutions offered in this paper may be summarised as practical techniques for eliminating the need for conventional construction machinery without compromising on productivity or safety, whether it be in relation to building foundations or superstructure.  Some techniques are a combination of a relatively new technology with existing ones; an example of this would be use of a battery-powered hand-held vacuum-excavator to execute an open caisson technique with on-site pre-casting of a reinforced concrete footing within a pre-fabricated sacrificial formwork assembly.  Other techniques are simply adaptations of modern ones for other construction materials; an example of this would be lateral stressing of multiple steel girders so as to guarantee sharing of action effects, instead of doing the same for multiple pre-stressed concrete girders, or multiple timber stringers, to the same end.

On the other hand, asset management practices put forth in this paper are focused on making it easier to gather, keep, manage and use high-quality asset condition data, with some assistance from a community of users with a similar asset.  At the centre of the proposed suite of asset management practices is a common digital platform hosted on a secure website; leveraging scale to drive down costs associated with qualifying, storing and using of condition data to make sound evidence-based asset management decisions.  Importantly, decision-making can be enhanced by analysis of data points acquired from a community of users who own similar assets. This data would have already been de-identified so as honour confidentiality for all users, be they private or institutional.

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