Highway Asset Management-Strategic Management For Highway Infrastructures

Highway asset management,which focuses on the efficiency on the operation of the highway asset and its repairment and improvement, is a systemic program. Highway asset management is from pavement management system. The establishment of a strongly systematic and easy-to-use asset management with definite aims, will be the inevitable direction of PMS, because of the challenges to highway from the rapid growth of traffic flow and environmental hazard, further more, increasing customer expecting.The paper introduced a technical evaluation of the state of infrastructure on principles, purposes and methods, and also discussed the related equipments and theorems. Based on the research on evaluation of assets at home and abroad, the paper put forward a value assessment methodology for highway asset - replacement value method in China. From the existing asset management systems, a method of strategic management of infrastructure, which aimed to maximize the benefit - cost of the infrastructure for facilities maintenance, eventually realized the optimizing of resources.Highway investment decision-making has three alternative situations: certainty, risk and uncertainty. The previous engineers are always trend to select the certainty kind. The paper focused on the analysis of the uncertainty situation by introducing the potential surprise theory by British economist Shaker for investment decisions. It is demonstrated that the uncertainty scheme can also reach considerable economic benefits by comparing the theoretical results with the project example in Indiana.One of the key points of highway asset management is to get the optimal thresholds to deal with infrastructure. The paper selected four common functional forms of facility performance models (exponential function, polynomial function, Logistic and power function), which were combined with the intevention costs function. Last, the paper presented an algorithm that can be used to derive the optimal interval, and consequently , the optimal threshold.