Optimizing Preventive Maintenance Strategies for Data and Security Systems in Civil Engineering Structures

The robustness and reliability of data and security systems is essential in modern Civil Infrastructures. A proactive maintenance approach is needed to ensure smooth operations, sustainability, and protection against potential threats. This paper delves into the significance of preventive maintenance strategies tailored specifically for data and security systems within civil engineering infrastructures. Several relevant articles and reports were reviewed to support a combined Qualitative and data-driven approach. This study simplifies a comparative analysis covering all types of preventive maintenance strategies guided by three governing factors: Level of Difficulty, Cumulative cost, and Downtime during maintenance, to help determine the best preventive maintenance approach. This paper explores the challenges of security and communication systems, existing maintenance methodologies and emphasizes the necessity of optimized preventive maintenance strategies to enhance system efficiency, longevity, and resilience. The results provided in this study highlight that although Time and calendar-based maintenance strategies are the easiest to carry out and offer low downtime during maintenance, the cumulative cost of such an approach is much more compared to Age, risk, and usage-based maintenance approaches. This study also highlights the using more complex maintenance strategies, like Failure finding maintenance, which may appear to be effective but offers much greater downtime than the other preventive strategies. Hence, determining the most effective preventive maintenance strategy is quite complicated, but this study helps to simplify it. In addition, this study advocates the need for more research on hybrid preventive maintenance strategies to help improve the reliability of these systems. © 2025 NIPES Pub.