Risk-based investment trade-off related to building facility management

Due to his or her profession, any building facility manager has to face many decision-making situations. One of the most important to be mentioned is the arbitration of a multi-year maintenance plan for buildings. Deciding between proposed maintenance actions, according to several constraints, so as to aim at satisfying corporate strategy is a complex choice. Risk approaches can be particularly effective because of their ability to handle complexity and uncertainties. The problem is then to be able to propose a method considering risks, adapted to the specific context of building facility management. Our method, regarded as a traditional approach, includes needed resources (i.e. costs) according to constraints (i.e. budget), but it also considers several risk domains (safety, technical preservation, client satisfaction, etc.), through the consequences (gain and loss). It proposes an ergonomic arbitration system based on filters following two complementary approaches: a selection of the fundamental actions and then an optimization of the plan (in a global view). The aim, for decision-makers, is to build their own solution by testing multiple angles of vision in simulation logic. This article presents the principles of the method, illustrated by an example of a real case conducted for a leading French company.