Future challenges for the Road Asset Management

Abstract

Road Asset Management is a systematic process of maintaining, upgrading and operating assets, combining engineering principles with sound business practice and economic rationale (OECD). In fact, it is a high-level management activity conducted by road authorities that help balance cost, risks and performance and includes data acquisition, data analysis and resources and budget planning. Today’s pavement managers meet the challenge to address their transportation needs with limited resources. Moreover, the legislative bodies have placed large demands on the highway agencies and more accountability for the expenditure of taxpayers’ money. As a result, the importance of management systems is even more significant than ever. In addition, autonomous vehicles are being developed and it is expected that vehicles with conditional automation are driving on motorways from 2019. These vehicles use a variety of sensors and cameras, which inspect the objects around it and detect road signs and lane markings. Furthermore, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) technologies are designed to allow automobiles to share information to each other and to the infrastructure and provide important information to improve the road safety. To date, several studies indicated that the environmental impact resulted from the road maintenance works or the operation of the road (congestion, noise, pollution, etc.) need to be considered in the asset management process. Furthermore, to make the final decision between alternative maintenance strategies road operators should take into consideration the impacts on socio-economic life. Moreover, new measurement systems are developed in the last years, which provide additional information for the road assets condition at traffic speed and improve the measurements with higher accuracy. This paper presents relevant topics and future challenges for the Road Asset Management. It summarizes latest issues related to the road infrastructure managing and maintaining and outlines new themes for future research.