Risk-based Asset Management Methodology for Highway Infrastructure Systems

About the report:

Maintaining the infrastructure of roads, highways, and bridges is paramount to ensuring that these assets will remain safe and reliable in the future. If maintenance costs remain the same or continue to escalate, and additional funding is not made available, the highway agency may need to reduce new construction or cut back on maintenance, or both. There is a close relationship between the cost of optimally scheduled preventive maintenance versus the cost of emergency maintenance or replacement. The study develops a systemic risk-based asset management methodology to manage the maintenance of highway infrastructure systems. The decision-making methodology is used to harmonize and coordinate the actions of the different units and levels in a hierarchical organization. The systemic methodology enables the filtering and assessment of assets for maintenance while addressing the potential for extreme events. The methodology balances the costs, benefits, and risks of maintenance and inspection policies as applied to various types of assets. Three objective functions are used in evaluating options and strategies: minimizing short-term cost, minimizing long-term cost, and maximizing the remaining service life of highway assets. A constraint function harmonizes the remaining service life across assets to eliminate infeasible options. The methodology is generally applicable to the asset management of large-scale dynamic systems that exhibit similar characteristics as highway systems.

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