Modelling the deterioration of buried infrastructure as a fuzzy Markov process

Dearth of data is the greatest acknowledged obstacle to the deterioration modeling of the buried infrastructure assets. In the last two decades numerous models have been proposed with a greater emphasis on Markovian Deterioration Processes (MDP). The MDP requires that the condition of the deteriorating system be encoded as an ordinal condition rating, based on numerous distress indicators obtained possibly from direct and indirect observations, as well as from non-destructive tests. The encoding of distress indicators into condition rating is inherently imprecise and involves subjective judgment. This imprecision is not considered, let alone propagated in the traditional application of the MDP.