Infrastructure Asset Management: Historic and Future Perspective for Tools, Risk Assessment, and Digitalization for Competence Building

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper is interesting, important and certainly worth publishing. It is a bit matter of test whether the suggested changes are minor or major but probably closer to the latter.

My suggestions: Title: I would spell out IAM in the title: Infrastructure Asset Management. Not everybody knows the definition of IAM.

Title itself. I think that the current title does NOT respond well enough the contents of the paper. Thus, it should be considered. You seem to concentar on the tools. How about such a title? ”Infrastructure Asset Management: Historic and future perspectives for tools, risk assessment and digitalization for competence building”

Abstract:

This article aims AT DESCRIBING the historic development of Infrastructure Asset Management (IAM) resulting from the increase of challenges over time. How about ANALYSING since this is what you have rather made?

METHODS: Should you say something about your literature review and personal involvement in various development projects (not probably far from action research) on long-run?

In the end of introduction:

The AIM of this paper is to provide a high level, chronological review of IAM practice in water and wastewater industry and from that reflect on the educational requirements.

This is fine. Just wondering if parts of the introduction could be removed to later chapters so that the aim of the paper would come EARLIER in the paper. Not insisting but just suggesting for your consideration.

For the introduction. Should you say something about IMPORTANCE of infrastructure and in the case of water systems, where the money actually is. Even some water and environment experts have a biased view on this since major research funds still go to treatment of water or wastewater (which is important, no doubt) while at least 80 % of investment and operational costs are due to infrastructure and networks. This point would point the importance of your topic.

You have covered literature well. Yet, if you wish you may explore these for having additional and likely wider views on this important topic.

* Hukka J.J. and Katko T.S. 2021. Towards Sustainable Water Services: Subsidiarity, Multi-level Governance and Resilience for Building Viable Water Utilities. CADWES publications. http://www.cadwes.com/publications/others/

* Hukka J.J. & Katko T.S. 2015. Resilient Asset Management and Governance for Deteriorating Water Services Infrastructure. 8th Nordic Conference on Construction Economics and Organization. Procedia Economics and Finance. 21: 112–119. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/22125671/21 (examples from some OECG countries on the State of Infrastructure: The biggest challenge to water services is ageing infrastructure)

* Rajala R.P. & Hukka J.J. 2018. Asset Life Cycle Management in Finnish Water Utilities. Journal of Water Resource and Protection. Jun. 28, 2018 587. DOI: 10.4236/jwarp.2018.106033

Good luck for finalising the important paper.

Author Response

Thank you very much for very valuable advice.

We will change the title according to your suggestion. This title gives a better introduction to the issues that we have discussed in the paper.

In the abstract we will replace the wording of describing (which was our first goal) to analyzing which we actually have done

We will consider to put the sentence of ultimate aim of the paper up-front in the introduction. We will also introduce a sentence about the importance of water infrastructure (pipelines)

Regarding the literature suggested, we intend to take a look at it and cite it where appropriate. This may delay the final submit a little but the delay should not be critical

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

I am okay with the revision.

Author Response

Thank you very much for making this second review. We are happy that you are satisfied.

We made a small changes in the document (title) and first paragraphs of the introduction

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors provided a high-level, chronological review of infrastructure asset management practice in water and wastewater industry. While the materials presented can be interesting to IAM practitioners, the value to IAM researchers is not clearly formulated and presented. The authors are recommended to restructure the manuscript to make the value position more clearly. For example, the manuscript does not have an objective and methodology statement in the Introduction section. One approach to revising the paper is to add a brief introduction section giving an overall background of the current status of IAM and anchor the proposed research in a proper position of the IAM landscape so that readers can quickly appreciate where you are coming from and where you are going. 

I have two points in disagreement with the authors.

First, "The ultimate aim of IAM has been to understand current condition and performance of urban water systems and rank relevant projects for system improvements", I disagree with this statement in two counts: For one, in addition to current condition and performance, another aspect of importance is the understanding of future demands and gap of capacity. The other one is ranking. Not all projects selection is completed by ranking.  Ranking is 1st-generation technology.

Second, I don't fully agree with the phasing of the three generations. The first generation is okay, but I don't think the second generation has phased out. The third generation may have started since 2010s, but the salient features of the second and third generations are not clearly defined in my view.  The subsequent discussions are mixed with practice and research. There is a huge gap between state of practice and state of research. Again, my confusion may be rooted back to the lack of objective statement at the beginning. For example, since 2015, researchers started to talk about the use of digital twin. But has this come to reality yet? I don't think so. Therefore, what do you really mean by 'competency needed' in the third generation when digital twin hasn't come to reality? Similarly, risk has been a hot research topic before 2015. But has risk-informed decision been properly implemented in practice? I don't think so. Therefore, when you divide the IAM into the three generations, do you mean by practice or by research? This must be clarified.

The manuscript also requires a careful proofread.

Reviewer 2 Report

It is my pleasure to review the manuscript: water-1420283, entitled “IAM: Historic development and future perspectives in light of 
competence building”. This study introduced three generations of the Infrastructure Asset Management (IAM) and the knowledges for the areas of risk analysis and urban water system. However, major concerns were address to the method and significance of this study. Hence, it is a pity, but this study could not be recommended for further consideration of the Water. 

Please find my specific comments below:

1. Please add some key findings and significance of this study in the Abstract
2. A deeper literature review on the recent published articles in past five years is essential to introduce the state of the art in the research field
3. Some structural descriptions (e.g., diagrams, tables) of the IAM are highly encouraged to improve the readability.
4. It`s highly encouraged to present more numerical or diagramatic results to improve readability
5. A deeper discussion based on comparison with previous findings is essential.
6. This study is more like an introduction of three generations of IAM. What is the significance of this study?