Knowledge base/Asset lifecycle/What counts as a 'complex asset'?

Context

Weaver is deliberately built for 'complex assets'. That is a restriction, not a marketing line, there are simpler categories of project (a single building, a small renovation, a software-only product) where Weaver would be over-specified. So what is the line?

We define it by the constraints, not by the industry.

Explanation

A complex asset has, in our experience, all four of these properties:

Property 1

Multi-decade operational life

30 years minimum, more typically 50–70. The asset has to remain operable across multiple generations of engineers, multiple software-vendor cycles, and multiple regulatory eras.

Property 2

Multi-stakeholder engineering

Hundreds of contractors and sub-contractors, multiple disciplines (civil, mechanical, electrical, instrumentation, safety), often spanning multiple jurisdictions and legal frameworks. Coordination of information is itself a sub-project.

Property 3

Regulatory accountability

A regulator can demand evidence about the asset's configuration at any point in its history. Inability to produce that evidence has commercial and sometimes criminal consequences.

Property 4

Information exceeds any single tool

No one CAD package, no one ERP system, no one document management system holds the whole picture. The information must be federated across many tools.

Concrete examples: research reactors, offshore wind farms, military platforms (submarines, aircraft), major infrastructure (tunnels, bridges, rail), large industrial plants. The common thread isn't the industry, it's the four properties above.

Was this article helpful?