Identifying research topics and trends in asset management for sustainable use: A topic modeling approach

Asset management is not new, and research has been conducted in private and public sectors on how to systematically maintain infrastructure or facilities for sustainable use and achieve the level of service desired by users or customers at the lowest life cycle costs. This research identifies the research topics and trends in asset management over the past 30 years. To this end, latent Dirichlet allocation, a topic modeling approach, was applied to articles published in engineering journals and investigated the following three research questions: (1) what have the key topics been for the past three decades? (2) what are the main activities and target sectors of asset management? (3) how have the research topics and keywords changed over the past three decades? The analysis shows that the target field of asset management has broadened while the main activities of asset management have been limited to several popular activities such as life cycle cost analysis and reliability analysis. Some implications and future research directions are also discussed.