Chapter 18: Asset management

Pavement modelling has historically been used by engineers to manage pavement networks and plan future maintenance. Models have been used to design new pavements and to predict the deterioration in and future condition of existing structures. They have been incorporated in pavement management systems (PMSs), where they are used to make financial decisions based on engineering data. The concept of using pavement data to determine future treatments at the lowest whole-life cost is well known and understood by engineers and asset managers responsible for highway networks and airports. PMSs are covered in detail in Chapter 5.

In recent years, pavement maintenance has been increasingly involved in a process known as ‘asset management’. This is a process that has some commonality with traditional PMS in that asset management systems still use pavement models to predict future condition, which is then used to determine annual and forward maintenance programmes. An asset management system has the functionality to consider more than just the engineering data and allows maintenance decisions to be made on a wide variety of data sets, which can align to non-engineering parameters such as the asset owner’s strategic objectives. This allows asset managers to make better informed strategic decisions that could be argued to be more beneficial to pavement users. These systems are also able to consume different data sets, which opens up the possibility of using new data in the decision-making process. This is a significant development to the approach taken in a traditional PMS, where maintenance decisions are based on traditional pavement survey data such as rutting, skidding and cracking measurements. Pavement asset management systems still rely on the modelling ability of traditional PMS but they have the functionality to use a wider range of different data sets in decision-making and, with the advances in digital mapping, they can provide improved visualisation of information.