Evaluation of the barriers to and drivers of the incorporation of unmanned aerial vehicles into dam asset management

ABSTRACT

Dam asset management entails the consistent evaluation of the state and usefulness of dams as tangible assets in terms of their expected lifespan, criticality, operational history, maintenance history, and long-term financing plan. This research aims to identify and evaluate the critical drivers and barriers associated with the use of unmanned aerial vehicles in dam asset management. This study uses rough decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory and interpretive structure modelling to analyze the interactions that take place between the barriers to and the drivers of unmanned aerial vehicles incorporation. To overcome the problem of vagueness, it develops rough set theory to determine the driving and dependence power of the drivers and the barriers, respectively. According to the findings, the most significant barrier to the incorporation of unmanned aerial vehicles into dam asset management is a lack of skilled operators, while the most significant driver of their incorporation is their cost-effectiveness. The findings of this study will be highly valuable to practitioners and government agencies working on the implementation of unmanned aerial vehicles in dam asset management, as they will enable them to correctly assess the different aspects of unmanned aerial vehicles incorporation.

KEYWORDS:

• Unmanned aerial vehicles
• dam asset management
• decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory
• interpretive structure modelling
• rough set theory

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D81
• D70
• L97

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17509653.2024.2345692

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [RGPIN-2019-04704].