Strategic Total Highway Asset Management Integration

Abstract

To manage a significant quantity of aging roadway infrastructure and growing traffic volume successfully, agencies are faced with challenges in developing reliable long-term plans that maximize network performance by optimizing programming preservation projects at the network level. Current practice typically involves relatively independent planning for bridge and pavement subassets, with a slight number of situations allowing for reliable trade-off analysis between the two. The choice to improve two bridges rather than one pavement section may yield a greater percentage increase in the bridge network performance than one pavement section would for the pavement network performance. The reliability of this choice being right and at the right time significantly decreases over the long term. Mutually inclusive highway asset planning by an integration of the bridge subasset into pavement subasset significantly increases long-term planning reliability. A key point of this strategic total highway asset management integration (STHAMi) approach is the conceptual structural integration factor. Integrating the bridge condition index into a pavement performance index allows for the treatment of bridges as equivalent pavement sections. STHAMi resulted in a higher percentage of model network treated per unit of value, coupled with consistently higher annual network performance during a 25-year span. Key benefits include the introduction of one pavement performance indicator as an overall encompassing highway performance measure for combined long-term bridge and pavement subasset planning. The approach makes long-term planning for both subassets possible in a pavement-oriented engineering organizational unit.