All along the asset life cycle: Research opportunities for operations and supply chain management
指出公共事业资产管理研究在运营与供应链管理领域尚不充分，梳理了现有文献，并提出了贯穿资产全生命周期的研究机会，对关注基础设施运营的学者有参考价值。
Without well-functioning public utilities, our society breaks down. They are the organizations that facilitate or provide infrastructure-based services, such as basic amenities (power, water, and sanitation), public transportation, and communication. They are either state-owned or at least tightly regulated, due to their natural monopoly character: there are substantial economies of scale and large capital requirements involved, and given their typical network-based operations, having multiple parallel systems is inefficient (McNabb, 2016). Managing the operations of public utilities is vital for safe, reliable, affordable, and sustainable functioning of the physical assets, the infrastructure, through which key services are provided (De Bruijn & Dicke, 2006; Wilkeshuis, 2010) and, thus, for the security, economic prosperity, and social well-being of all citizens (Rinaldi et al., 2001). Furthermore, effective management of public utilities is—either directly or indirectly—imperative for meeting the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. Consider, for example, the centrality of water and energy networks for access to clean water (SDG 6) and energy (SDG 7) as well as for good health and well-being (SDG 3) and sustainable cities and communities (SDG 11). In light of the efforts to transition to a socially just and sustainable society, one would expect the operations of utilities to feature prominently in state-of-the-art operations and supply chain management (OSCM) research. So far, this is only partly the case. For example, Joglekar et al. (2016) found that of all the industry-specific studies in OSCM, only a small proportion covered public utilities, such as the energy sector and transportation. As we will elaborate, review of the literature for the purpose of this special issue still reveals only a limited number of contributions. The operational and supply chain aspects of public utilities manifest in different but highly related sets of processes. The first and probably most visible set of processes relates to how the services facilitated by the public utility assets are being designed and delivered. Literature within the operations management and operations research domains has addressed this topic in diverse areas, such as public transport services (Dollevoet et al., 2014), drinking water access (Zhai et al., 2023), and electric vehicle (EV) charging services (Guillet & Schiffer, 2023). The second set of processes pertains to asset operations and the life cycle of the physical assets that the utilities own—that is, how these assets are acquired, operated, maintained, and ultimately disposed or refurbished/recycled. Compared with the literature on service operations for utilities, the literature on asset operations for utilities is rather scant. Such studies of asset management, including utility assets, are traditionally more prevalent in the fields of (civil) engineering and public policy. Studying asset management for utilities from an operations perspective brings several benefits that society desperately needs, because the functioning of these public assets is increasingly under threat. This threat is significant for both old and new assets. The most visible category, and a significant share of all utility assets, are the old assets that were built in the postwar growth decades. Many, if not most, of these are in need of replacement, now that the end of their technical lifetimes is approaching. The United States, for example, has more than 610,000 bridges of which one in four is more than 65 years old. US infrastructure in general is rated by the American Society of Civil Engineers (2021) to be “mostly below standard.” Similar problems with road transportation network maintenance are present throughout the world. For example, in France, an assessment of 45,000 bridges shows that 10% of the structures surveyed required immediate attention to ensure public safety (Koeppel, 2024). The same holds for water transportation networks, rail networks, and the like. Infrastructure that is much older than post-World War II, but which remains in use today, is of course also often at risk. Take, for instance, the often-centuries-old, but crumbling, bridges and canal walls of Amsterdam (Erdbrink, 2021). Sure enough, appropriate levels of maintenance can help raise the condition of these “aging assets” and extend their technical lifetimes. However, there is not only a shortage of public budgets for this but also an acute and growing shortage of skilled and experienced workers in most economies. Appropriate levels of maintenance are not achievable without drastic increases in labor productivity, which is one area where the OSCM community excels and thus could lend an experienced hand. Moreover, asset owners and regulators are typically reluctant to close down important infrastructure for long periods because these assets are used so intensively. As such, time windows for renovations and replacements are short. This calls for the planning of operations under time constraints, which is another strong area of expertise of the OSCM community. The construction and commissioning of new assets also present significant challenges. For example, the Dutch government aims to build more than 800 new offshore wind turbines in the North Sea by 2030. To date, there are some 300 turbines in that area, the oldest dating back to 2007. With conventional work methods and against historical labor productivity, building and commissioning these new and complex assets will be impossible. These wind farms are much farther from the coast, on a rough sea. Cargo traffic in these regions is intense and challenging to work around, and the availability of skilled technicians is again extremely limited. Meanwhile, that same North Sea is still littered with some 600 increasingly outdated oil platforms (Pearce, 2018), which must still be decommissioned in the coming years or refurbished for other purposes. Under current work methods, the associated costs are great. In sum, this presents yet another challenge for which an application of OSCM insights would be highly beneficial. These collective societal and managerial challenges, and the hitherto limited application of OSCM insights, has motivated us to organize a special issue on “Operational Excellence for Utilities.” In the remainder of this editorial, we first take stock of what the literature in our field has contributed thus far. We then reflect on the objectives of this special issue and results from our call for articles. We close by providing suggestions for promising OSCM research topics in this field. Despite its importance, operations, and asset management for utilities has not attracted substantial empirical research interest in the OSCM literature. Contemporary evidence to this point emerges from a review of utilities-focused research studies appearing between 2020 and 2024 in empirically-focused OSCM journals, being JOM, Production & Operations Management, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Management Science, International Journal of Operations & Production Management, and Journal of Supply Chain Management. In our own review of this literature, we considered both abstracts content as well as the full text of articles, in cases where orientation to the topic of utility asset management could not be discerned by abstract alone. Quite a few of the articles we at first identified focus more on the management of services rendered through utility assets, rather than on the management of the assets themselves (see, e.g., Li et al., 2023; Shen et al., 2021; Thirumalai & Devaraj, 2024). Consequently, we dropped these articles from our set. We also removed articles for which utilities were mere context (e.g., Amaya & Holweg, 2024; Bhardwaj & Ketokivi, 2021). Some articles focus on pricing schemes, such as for charging in the context of electric vehicle adoption (Valogianni et al., 2020), subsidy policy design for electric vehicle adoption (Zhang & Dou, 2022), or consumer policy impact on solar panel production costs (Gerarden, 2023). Again, such articles were also not included in our final set. Eventually, this process resulted in the identification of 20 articles: 5 in Production and Operations Management, 5 in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, 7 in Management Science, and 3 in JOM. Of these 20 articles that remained, the vast majority pertain to the planning phase of the overall public utility asset life cycle in the energy, mobility and drinking water sectors. These studies primarily use various types of modeling approaches. Using a dynamic programming approach, Wu et al. (2023) compare centralized versus distributed energy storage, Wu et al. (2022) study smart charging business models. Kaps et al. (2023) find optimal capacity levels for renewable generation and storage, while Fischetti and Fischetti (2023) study the combined optimization of turbine location and connection cables for offshore wind parks. Wang and He (2023) analyze capacity of park-and-ride lots and Liu et al. (2022) plan bike lane infrastructure. Yu et al. (2022) use game-theory for EV charging stations and Qi et al. (2023) look at battery swapping services for EVs. In the water sector, Zhai et al. (2023) study location decisions for drinking water projects. Sošić (2023) analyze the possibilities for desalination plants to coproduce salt and fresh water, while Mun et al. (2021) assess the development of hydro systems that can deal with interconnected issues pertaining to water, energy, food, and flooding in developing countries. A small number of studies specifically address the operations and maintenance stages of the asset life cycle. Zhang et al. (2024) draw on a single case study for the transition from projects to regular operations at Beijing Dax International Airport. Drawing on field experiments, Uppari et al. (2024) study consumer behavior and operational inefficiencies under an off-grid lighting model. Other studies address research questions more unique to utilities, specifically the energy sector. Agrawal and Yücel (2022) study electricity demand-response programs, particularly the role of baselines and baseline adjustment and corresponding rebates. Qi et al. (2022) use linear programming to determine how shared autonomous EVs could help reinforce solar-powered urban microgrids. Feng and Menezes (2022) examine a combined wind-grid hydrogen system to power manufacturing processes. Bensoussan et al. (2022) develop a real-options model in the context of renewable energy while Sunar and Swaminathan (2021) conduct numerical analysis to the impact of net-metered distributable renewable energy only articles, both in JOM, address multiple stages of the asset life cycle. et al. (2024) case and system modeling to the by public Dutch of the operations, and maintenance of plants by In the area of in et al. 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