Highway Construction Quality Index for Florida

Abstract

The Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) is developing strategies to improve the quality of transportation infrastructure while coping with changes in business models and reductions in agency personnel. Nationwide, policy is changing more quickly than ever, and every policy change reinforces the need for contractors who perform high-quality work. There have been several initiatives in the past to develop some kind of rational, objective system of rating the quality of highway construction projects. There have also been initiatives to utilize these ratings for substantial issues such as contractor qualification and bidding purposes, but not one state uses their quality ratings for anything more substantial than setting contractors’ bidding ceilings. Some states do not use these ratings at all and some states do not even rate the quality of their projects. One of the chief complaints against current systems is their subjectivity. The construction quality index, developed through a grant from FDOT, is a rating of the quality of materials and workmanship on highway projects that, unlike current quality rating models used by state highway agencies, is totally objective. Under limited validation testing, the model assigned quality index values consistent with the owner's level of satisfaction with the project.