Transportation infrastructure asset management in the new millennium: continuing issues, and emerging challenges and opportunities

The time has come for renewed emphasis on the life cycle management of the physical aspects of transportation infrastructure. The urgency for this new direction is underscored by the fact that the physical transportation network at most countries constitutes the most valuable publicly owned infrastructure and efforts must be made to keep it resilient to possible threats of man-made or natural disasters over its service life so that the movement of people and goods can continue uninterrupted to serve the economy and maintain the quality of life. The concept of transportation asset management (TAM) is a systematic process based on multiple disciplines (engineering, finance, operations research and economics), to make cost-effective repair and replacement decisions geared towards a sustained state of good repair over the infrastructure life cycle. This paper first argues for the continued application of asset management principles for transportation infrastructure in the new millennium. The paper then discusses the development cycle of transportation infrastructure as a prelude to a discussion of the key functions of an asset management system. The paper proceeds to identify the components (asset types) and elements of asset management (that is, the tasks that are carried out by an asset manager in an agency). The challenges and opportunities of asset management in the new millennium are then discussed. These include, among others, the specter of climate change, infrastructure resilience, sustainable development of transportations assets, the emerging era of autonomous vehicles and smart cities, and the consideration of transportation assets as a holistic system-of-systems. These issues are addressed in the context of the availability of big data and advances in analytical techniques and computing power.