Denver International Airport demonstrates predictive asset‑management dashboard to council committee

Denver International Airport Chief Operating Officer Dave LaPorte and airport asset managers presented the airport’s predictive asset‑management program to the Business, Arts, Workforce, Climate and Aviation Services Committee, demonstrating a live dashboard that airport staff said shows current risk, remaining useful life and long‑term rehabilitation and replacement costs.

Brian Holden, Senior Director for Asset Management at Denver International Airport, introduced the presentation and turned the briefing to the asset team. The presenter described how the airport transitioned from a reactive maintenance approach to a predictive, whole‑life asset‑management program. “This is actually the dashboard, and this is live, so this is actually going live to Denver,” the presenter said while showing a matrix that plots about 26,000 vertical assets by consequence and likelihood of failure.

Key figures shown to the committee included an average asset age of about 12.35 years, an average risk score around 8 on a 1–25 scale, and a replacement‑value snapshot the presenter described as “$2,000,000,000.” The dashboard allows staff to filter by location, asset group and year and to project rehabilitation and replacement costs across a 30‑year horizon. The presenter said the system can surface multi‑year spikes — for example, several central‑plant cooling towers approaching end of life — and allow planners and maintenance managers to run engineering studies or re‑evaluate maintenance strategies.

Committee members asked about scope and level of detail. Staff said an asset is typically defined as any item with a value over $5,000 and expected life over one year, so the system groups some items (for example, restroom systems) rather than tracking every fixture. Airport staff said vertical assets (buildings, equipment) were entered first; this year the airport has begun condition assessments for horizontal assets, including roughly 200 miles of sanitary, storm and other piping. The presenter said the horizontal condition assessment is a multi‑year effort that began with jetting and CCTV inspection of pipes and that staff had already found a noncritical crack in a pipe that would be repaired.

Officials described steps to institutionalize the program beyond a small number of staff who developed the dashboard internally. The airport said much of the work to populate the system has been done in‑house (the presenter mentioned a single staffer, “Frankie,” who had led dashboard work), and the next stage is to document and institutionalize the process so it can be sustained and scaled.

Council members asked about the tool’s utility for bond planning and for sharing the approach with other city departments. The airport said the data will be usable for capital improvement planning, preventive maintenance optimization and, over time, for AI‑driven predictive alerts tied to Internet‑of‑Things monitoring. The presentation ended with committee members expressing strong interest in broader city uses and in receiving follow‑up information about staffing and annual costs for the asset‑management program.