Australias civil infrastructure assets of roads, bridges, railways, buildings and other structures are worth billions of dollars. To effectively manage road infrastructures, road agencies firstly need to optimise the expenditure for data collection whilst not jeopardising the reliability in using the optimised data to predict maintenance and rehabilitation costs. Secondly, road agencies need to accurately predict the deterioration rates of infrastructures to reflect local conditions so that the budget estimates can be accurately calculated. Finally, the prediction of budgets for maintenance and rehabilitation must be reasonably reliable.
A procedure for assessing investment decisions for road asset management has been developed as part of this research and includes methods for:
- optimising data collection
- calibrating deterioration prediction models
- assessing risk-adjusted estimates for life-cycle cost estimates.
The procedures and methods developed in this study will yield affordable, comprehensive, relevant, and high-quality asset data, using accurate prediction models and analysis tools in assessing lifecycle costing for road asset management.