Levels of service

Defining and measuring levels of service is a key activity in developing infrastructure asset management plans.

[2][3][4] Levels of service may be tied to physical performance of assets or be defined via customer expectation and satisfaction.

[4][3] For instance in the case of sewer infrastructure, a municipality (as the service provider) may measure the number of micro-cracks in a pipe or sewer and model its expected lifetime to ensure the quality of the service, but the user's main concern is the availability and reliability of the sewer system, not necessarily the technical aspects of the physical infrastructure.

In simple words, as long as the user can flush his/her toilet, he/she may not have any issue with the deterioration of the pipe.

Assuming that their desired LOS for roads is an average PCI of 80 and an average travel time of 50 minutes from point A to B, they have to work towards this objective by improving current levels of service.

Many organizations use physical performance indicators to represent levels of service. The graph shows the change in International Roughness Index , a physical performance indicator often used to represent the LOS of road assets. [ 1 ]