Condition based risk management (CBRM), a vital step in investment planning for asset replacement

The CBRM process, described in this paper, enables owners and operators of distribution and transmission networks to systematically link detailed engineering knowledge of network assets to critical corporate decision making processes. CBRM has been successfully used by electricity companies, in regulatory submissions (e.g. DPCR4 in the UK), to define and justify future spending requirements on the basis of asset condition and future performance. Ongoing development and implementation of the CBR-M principles provides a major opportunity to build asset management programmes based on targeting spending to achieve defined and sustainable levels of performance, at minimum cost.