White P
apers:
Tradeoff Analysis Target Setting for Transportation Asset Management
EXTRACT: The ultimate goals of Asset Management are to create the most value for the least cost over the long term. This includes the ability to drive policy debate, communicate investment options, and confidently make and defend investment decisions. In addition to optimizing total spending across asset classes and programs is the need to provide traceability and accountability for decisions. Underlying these objectives are analysis capabilities and processes that are only now beginning to emerge.
During the past few years, many organizations have been assembling the building blocks they feel are necessary to enable their vision for Asset Management. These building blocks usually include “management systems” for programs such as Maintenance, Pavement, Bridge, and perhaps Safety and others. But few organizations have begun to consider capabilities to evaluate a “bigger picture” beyond the bounds of each management system, such as program-to-program investment tradeoff analysis.
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Integrating Safety & Asset Management for Breakthrough Improvements
EXTRACT: The budget available to invest in highway safety projects is a limited resource; maximizing the return on safety investments is a critical strategic capability. The application of basic Asset Management principles to safety efforts can result in major gains in the value obtained from safety investments, making better use of the limited Safety Budget, and having a profound impact on the safety of the traveling public.
Improvements in return-on-investment take several forms:
- Getting a better return for a given investment
- Getting the same return for reduced cost
- Freeing up money that can be used for additional investment.
To realize such improvements, there are three key steps to optimizing the safety return on investment that can be achieved by an entity such as a state DOT:
- Prioritize each and every project in the wide range of safety work using the Benefit/Cost ratio
- Setting the optimal budget for the Safety Program, in conjunction with appropriate Safety performance targets, and with respect to other program budgets
- Identifying and capitalizing on synergies and compromises between projects (across programs)
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Maximizing the Effectiveness of Asset Management - What Improvements are Possible?
EXTRACT: It would be nice if transportation project selection was a simple one-step process of comparing a variety of projects and then choosing the best ones based upon a handy multiple-criteria decision making scheme. Unfortunately if the goal is to maximize value for the money in transportation-related investments, then an effective one-step process does not exist. Instead, three distinct, powerful steps are necessary in order to reduce costs and create value to the maximum extent possible.
Using the capabilities of various systems and processes, and in the right sequence, is necessary in order to make the best transportation investments. Specifically, management systems, typically one for each program or asset class, are needed to provide prioritized projects within a given program and also rationale to eliminate or marginalize non-competitive projects. Program-to-Program Tradeoff Analysis is necessary in order to establish performance targets for each program and asset class and to distribute revenue accordingly. Finally, an analysis is required to reconcile all the synergies and compromises that exist between project components, such as considering Pavement objectives together with Safety objectives, for a given project.
By following this recommended process, savings can be maximized along with providing maximum value. The overall cost reduction that we estimate from incorporating these “best practices” of asset management range from about 7 to 11% of a typical DOT’s highway-related budget. In other words, with a total budget of $200 MM for Pavement, Bridges, Safety, Capacity additions, etc. the possible savings are in the vicinity of about $18 MM.
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TITLE: Green Asset Valuation & Carbon Sequestration in an Integrated Asset Management System...
National, State and Local Government have a responsibility for managing and maintaining publicly owned green assets such as trees, verges, vegetation in the rights of way and parks. In an age of sustainability green assets have a wider environmental and financial value by explicitly quantifying their role in carbon sequestration.
Asset valuation techniques need to be extended to include carbon sequestration capabilities and the potential to generate income through carbon trading schemes. With research on going a flexible and adaptable spatially enabled integrated asset management system (IAMS) is a vital component of an agency’s sustainability strategy. Quantifying sequestration capability and accurate green asset valuations may provide opportunities for government agencies to generate income through carbon trading.
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Title: Road Safety – Safety Professionals need to find newer ways to collect, analyze and act on data: 
Road safety is something that affects all of us. Whether we drive, cycle or walk we are at risk of becoming one of the statistics of being killed or injured before we reach our destination. Those statistics estimate that 1.2 million of us will be killed and 50 million of us will be injured each year worldwide.
Yet in most of our minds being involved in a road crash is something that happens to somebody else and not to us. Perhaps it is this way of thinking and the attitude that road crashes are an inevitable part of modern day living which gives credibility to the estimate that there will be a 65% increase in road crashes between the years 2000 and 2020.
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Title: Exor Corporation: Linear Referencing System Hub...
The Exor LRS Hub is a solution comprising a number of Exor products and features. Together these products provide a serverside application wrapped with open access interfaces, which allows for the creation of both a single source of truth data repository as well as a ‘glue’ binding together silo data sources across the enterprise.
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Title: Effective Asset Management in Linear Industries... 
The Transportation and Utility Industries are no different to many others nowadays in that financial pressures demand that effective management practices are employed to allow ‘more to be done for less’. The provision of a measurable service to the customer is required at a cost that is justifiable to the stakeholders, whoever they may be. Also we are seeing an increasing trend towards privatization across the world, where the provider of the service is seeking to make a profit on the operation. The business of owning and maintaining such assets is therefore more like any other than perhaps at any time in the past with Senior Executives forced to manage in a much more business-orientated fashion.
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Title: Integrating Traffic Data into Enterprise Highways Information Systems... 
Traffic Monitoring is a fundamental business function of highway agencies. All highway agencies collect and manage traffic data using COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) software or with the use of ad-hoc ‘in house’ tools. They need this data to support crucial agency functions, like reporting road usage statistics, carrying out asset management activities, and designing road improvements. Rapidly growing new uses of traffic monitoring are to support agencies’ internal performance monitoring strategies or as the basis for shadow tolling.
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Title: Integrating the Pavement Prediction Model with the Road Asset Management System...
Pavement management systems support a vital highway agency business function, yet they depend on information also needed for many other functions. In many highway agencies this information is locked into a dedicated pavement model database such as HDM4 or dTIMS. This paper describes in detail an approach to integrating pavement management analysis into a road asset management system. This integration enhances both the pavement management and asset management functionality.
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Title: Harmonizing Engineering and ERP for Holistic Asset Management...
Engineering-based organizations will already use Exor, or similar, software to provide operational engineering solutions for the maintenance of the assets under their control. A typical Exor customer in the Highways market sector, for example, will maintain the Road and Footway Network, associated Street Furniture, Pavement Management System (PMS) Condition Surveys, Scheme Management and the recording of Asset Condition Surveys.
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