Asset management is becoming increasingly important to an organization’s strategy, given its effects on cost, production, and quality. No matter the sector, important decisions are made based on techniques and theories that are thought to optimize results; asset management models and techniques could help maximize effectiveness while reducing risk. Optimum Decision Making in Asset Management posits that effective decision making can be augmented by asset management based on mathematical techniques and models. Resolving the problems associated with minimizing uncertainty, this publication outlines a myriad of methodologies, procedures, case studies, and management tools that can help any organization achieve world-class maintenance. This book is ideal for managers, manufacturing engineers, programmers, academics, and advanced management students.

This book examines sustainable wealth formation and dynamic decision-making. The global economy experienced a veritable meltdown of asset markets in the years 2007-9, where many funds were overexposed to risky returns and suffered considerable losses. On the other hand, the long-term upswing in the stock market since 2010 has led to asset price booms and some new, but also uneven, wealth formation. In this book a broader set of constraints and guidelines for asset management and wealth accumulation is developed. The authors investigate how wealth formation and the proper management of financial funds can help to adequately buffer income risk and obtain sufficient risk-free income at a later stage of life, while also being socially and environmentally sustainable. The book explores behavioral and institutional rules for decision-making that reflect such constraints and guidelines, without necessarily being optimal in the narrow sense. The authors explain the need for such a dynamic decision-making and dynamic re-balancing of portfolios, by putting forward dynamic programming as an approach to dynamic decision-making that can allow sustainable wealth accumulation and dynamic asset allocation to be successfully integrated. This book provides a clear and comprehensive treatment of asset accumulation and dynamic portfolio models with an emphasis on long term and sustainable wealth formation. An important concern in public debate is the sustainability of our economy and this book employs cutting edge quantitative techniques and models to highlight important facts that cannot be disputed under any reasonable assumptions. It has the potential to become a standard reference for both academic researchers and quantitatively trained practitioners. Eckhard Platen, Professor of Quantitative Finance, University of Technology Sydney, Australia This book should be read by both academics and practitioners alike. The former will find intellectually rigorous discussions and innovative solutions. The latter may find a few of the concepts a bit challenging. Yet, theory and technology are there to help simplify the work of those who worry about what time it is rather than how to make a watch--- but they do need a watch. Jean Brunel, Founder of Brunel Associates and Editor of The Journal of Wealth Management

Track 3 of WERF’s Strategic Asset Management Project was developed to “provide guidance on implementing SAM...and develop analytic tools for SAM implementation” - the Decision Support Tools and Implementation Guidance goal. In Track 3, the Decision Support Tools and Implementation Guidance goal was organized around two major elements: Analytic/Decision Support Tools – Develop staged, user-friendly analytic and decision support tools (gap analysis, cost benefit analysis, risk management, life cycle costing, condition assessment selection tool, etc.) for SAM implementation and continuous improvement. Implementation Tool – Provide practical, accessible guidance for an implementation tool to undertake SAM in incremental stages leading to a well-planned, structured, and progressive implementation to suit the needs of a diverse range of utilities’ communication practices. Task Order 2 provided for the following deliverables: Set up Practitioner Tool-Review Working Group and Establish Framework Catalogue Available “Commercial Off-The-Shelf” SAM tools Identify and Prioritize Core Set of Tools Identify Critical Success Factors for Implementing SAM Review and Modify the Gap Analysis Tool Refine the “Six Alternative Routes to Implementation” Tool Develop Information Requirements for SAM Decision Making The materials presented in the following sections were developed as a result of executing Task Order 2 to achieve the Project goal. Each chapter details a separate deliverable. Relevant developed materials have been or are in the process of being added to SIMPLE, WERF’s web-based asset management knowledge base. Asset management can be defined as a way of management thinking and a set of best practices built around a structured framework that assist asset managers in making the most cost effective investment decisions in existing and new assets to sustain long term performance of the assets in an environment of limited resources where these decisions represent an integration of operations, maintenance, and capital intervention strategies. At the heart of the framework is the concept of business risk – a metric that measures the interaction of the probability of failure, the consequence of failure, and risk mitigation strategies. This research: Facilitates the adoption of best practice in asset management in the public water utility industry Provides an asset management knowledge base that is a structured repository of a broad range and deeply substantive collection of materials oriented toward the practicing asset manager Addresses the why and how of asset management at levels for novice, intermediate, and advanced practitioners

The scope of this volume is primarily to analyze from different methodological perspectives similar valuation and optimization problems arising in financial applications, aimed at facilitating a theoretical and computational integration between methods largely regarded as alternatives. Increasingly in recent years, financial management problems such as strategic asset allocation, asset-liability management, as well as asset pricing problems, have been presented in the literature adopting formulation and solution approaches rooted in stochastic programming, robust optimization, stochastic dynamic programming (including approximate SDP) methods, as well as policy rule optimization, heuristic approaches and others. The aim of the volume is to facilitate the comprehension of the modeling and methodological potentials of those methods, thus their common assumptions and peculiarities, relying on similar financial problems. The volume will address different valuation problems common in finance related to: asset pricing, optimal portfolio management, risk measurement, risk control and asset-liability management. The volume features chapters of theoretical and practical relevance clarifying recent advances in the associated applied field from different standpoints, relying on similar valuation problems and, as mentioned, facilitating a mutual and beneficial methodological and theoretical knowledge transfer. The distinctive aspects of the volume can be summarized as follows: Strong benchmarking philosophy, with contributors explicitly asked to underline current limits and desirable developments in their areas. Theoretical contributions, aimed at advancing the state-of-the-art in the given domain with a clear potential for applications The inclusion of an algorithmic-computational discussion of issues arising on similar valuation problems across different methods. Variety of applications: rarely is it possible within a single volume to consider and analyze different, and possibly competing, alternative optimization techniques applied to well-identified financial valuation problems. Clear definition of the current state-of-the-art in each methodological and applied area to facilitate future research directions.

This book gathers selected peer-reviewed papers from the 14th World Congress on Engineering Asset Management (WCEAM), which was held in Singapore on 28–31 July 2019, as well as papers presented during the 1st WCEAMOnline event which focused on the ramifications of Covid-19 on infrastructure systems. This book covers a wide range of topics in engineering asset management, including: asset management services provisioning; servitization; decision-making; asset management systems; industrial Internet of things; and vulnerability and resilience of infrastructure systems. The breadth and depth of these state-of-the-art, comprehensive proceedings make them an excellent resource for asset management practitioners, researchers and academics, as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students.