The investment planning feature in EAM take budget information for future planning periods, investment options for equipment and capital planning requests, and then calculates an optimized investment plan for these future periods. To calculate the investment plan, EAM calls the Asset Investment Planning (AIP) engine from the EAM Constraint Optimizer. When an asset condition has degraded so far that non-routine or maintenance action is required, a plan is developed for the investment needed to restore it, whether by replacement or by refurbishment.
In EAM, the desired equipment and capital planning request information are specified on the Investment Planning screen. A planning request is then initiated and sent to the Constraint Optimizer in JSON format. The constraint optimizer generates the investment action plans for the indicated planning period, and returns the planning process results to EAM as records.
The result of the planning process is a list of investments specified for each period with the planning period, as well as a list of investments which could not be planned due to insufficient budget during the specified planning period.