Assigning priorities for maintenance, repair and refurbishment in managing a municipal housing stock

The municipality of Lisbon owns a large housing stock that requires maintenance, repair and refurbishment. Taken together, these activities imply a financial effort each year that clearly exceeds the available budget, and therefore it is critical that the decisions on which sub-set of potential activities should be carried out in each coming year are based on sound analysis and evaluation. The design and construction process of a model to assist the Lisbon Municipality to assign priorities to these activities is described. The macbeth approach was extensively used, in an interactive and constructive process, to derive the value functions associated with each criterion and their respective weights, reflecting municipal policies and their officials, preferences and attitudes. The paper also presents the procedure used to determine multidimensional reference-profiles that define urgency categories, enabling us to assign each potential action to one of these categories. Finally, a specific model was defined to aggregate elemental building jobs in ‘packages’, when there are arguments (in terms of cost reduction, action coherence, urban environment impact synergies, etc.) that favour their joint execution under a single contract.