Selecting infrastructure maintenance projects with Robust Portfolio Modeling

Abstract

Project portfolios for the annual maintenance of infrastructure assets may contain dozens of projects which are selected out of hundreds of candidate projects. In the selection of these projects, it is necessary to account for multiple evaluation criteria, project interdependencies, and uncertainties about project performance as well as financial and other relevant constraints. In this paper, we report how Robust Portfolio Modeling (RPM) has been used repeatedly at the Finnish Transport Agency (FTA) for bridge maintenance programming. At FTA, project selection decisions are guided by the RPM's Core Index values which are derived from portfolio-level computations and reflect incomplete information about the relative importance of evaluation criteria. To-date, this application has been rerun with fresh data for six consecutive years. By drawing on experiences from this application, we discuss preconditions for the successful use of RPM or other methods of Portfolio Decision Analysis in comparable settings. We also develop an approximative algorithm for computing non-dominated portfolios in large project selection problems.