I recently had the opportunity to give a presentation on New Optimization Methods for Pavement Data at the European Road Profile Users’ Group (ERPUG) meeting in Brussels, Belgium. I talked about integrated asset management and about how this can assist in communicating economic and engineering needs to decision makers in order to ensure funds and attention.
The presentation provided some background on the subject of cross asset management, followed by a look at the analysis concept, the case of Pavement Analysis and the benefits. Further, the presentation stressed the importance of supporting all links in the asset management chain, from engineers to executives, and to help road owners and operators provide tax payers with the best solutions possible.
Key Points of the Presentation
The more assets and the more complex the infrastructure, the greater the need and benefit of performing analysis across many different parameters including user service levels, strategic modality strategies, and based on a series of constraints in terms of allocated budgets, natural resources and reduced intervention/lane closures. The more dense and sophisticated the traffic and transport, the higher the need to develop clever plans and methods for maintenance.
A trade-off analysis allows the decision makers to get an overview of the performance of the assets, according to the money invested, helping to find the right balance between investments and performance. The road owner can define the appropriate investment levels for each considered program and also manage the timing of various intervention projects, not only in terms of when to intervene in order to cause the least disturbance to the transport system, but also in terms of predicting the long-term influence of projects on the overall service level.
Using trade-off analysis tools, their outputs are partly strategic projections of conditions and costs of reaching the desired level of service, and partly directly deployable work plans. There is a series of combined advantages of these solutions, spanning from the traditional asset management methods of analyzing assets in silos and based on historic experiences and numbers to the more refined analysis tools, performing multi-year and multi-asset type analysis that allows decision makers to plan ahead and spend the funds at hand most wisely.
The very advanced asset management tools match economic as well as engineering goals offering the road engineer a tool to manage the assets but also to be a “fund-raiser” in terms of procuring the right amount of money to reach the desired levels of service. The more clearly you can define how money benefits the asset owner, the more smoothly the budgeting process will run.
As political and public demands for improved mobility, safety and green transport grows, the asset manager needs to be able to respond with Key Performance Indicators that match expectations.
At AgileAssets our system developers are constantly building and refining infrastructure asset management products that enable users to communicate needs and possible solutions across the organization. The core System Foundation™ collects data from a large variety of platforms and creates reports to fit the audience. The Manager Series of modules build on the collected data from the core System Foundation to deliver the best possible maintenance plans. The Analyst Series modules provide individual asset analysis, and the Trade-Off Analyst™ tool delivers true cross-asset management in the form of recommendations on how to invest smarter.
Written by: Mikkel Bruun on November 6, 2014