Sukalpa Biswas – TRL’s Practice Lead for asset management, and Dr. Alex Wright – TRL’s Chief Technologist discuss the group’s latest publication ‘The Digital Evolution of Highway Infrastructure Asset Management‘ and highlight some of the report’s key findings.
Over the last 25 years, the concept of asset management has become common for highways authorities across the world. They have adopted and implemented asset management practices to collect, record, manage and use asset data to make informed decisions on the management of highway assets.
However, technological improvements over the last decade in the collection of data from assets, as well as for their management and operation, have changed, and will continue to change, the way infrastructure assets are used, and the way they are maintained and constructed. This digital evolution in asset data has created uncertainty around current highways asset management processes, and established an imminent requirement for transition from “Traditional” to “Intelligent” asset management. In this paper we identify some of the key actions required to deliver this transition in asset management practice, and hence to maximise the benefits of the digital evolution.
A traditional asset management process defines the physical properties of the asset, and then uses established techniques to measure and understand deterioration in those properties, and hence identify maintenance (and financial investment) requirements. The asset management strategy and plan describe the actions needed, in accordance with current best practice guidelines and standards. This approach is well developed, tested, and proven to be efficient in meeting current industry expectations.
However, this situation is changing with the availability of a wide range of new data. In the current model, asset data collection systems are “outcome driven”, providing data in standardised formats, in line with the requirement of asset management systems to support decisions about the asset.
Conversely, new types of data could support a wide range of asset management decisions. The potential of these sources such as surveys, crowd sourcing, Internet of Things and remote sensing have been discussed in TRL’s paper on the New Toolkit for Highways Asset Management. However, the options available to best exploit these data types in asset management have not yet been fully explored.
Typical strategies, policies and standards for asset management do not currently provide the ability to fully exploit new types of data or technology – for example to support design, planning, operations, reactive and predictive maintenance, understanding of user experience, etc.
Therefore, although TRL’s toolkit has suggested a number of steps that could be taken to open up a wide range of uses for new data and technologies, once these have been defined, asset data management strategy and policy will also need to be upgraded to support the implementation. Data management strategies will need to identify how asset data management systems should incorporate / integrate / ingest these data. Policies will need to address the uncertainty, accessibility, ownership, format and referencing.
To incorporate new data and technologies in the decision-making process, the standards (e.g., DMRB, UKPMS etc), and the key performance indicators (KPI) used in asset management planning and analysis will need to be re-defined, overarching asset management strategy & policy updated, and standardisation achieved, for example via ISO 55000.
Figure 1: Key enabling factors for Digital Evolution of Asset Management
We are proposing 5 steps in a transformation programme:
Step 1 – Identify what data is required, from which technologies, and the costs associated.
Step 2 – Devise a flexible evaluation framework to establish the value of the data in terms of its usability, benefit and cost.
Step 3 – Create a business case model that will provide justification (efficiency and cost) for introducing new data.
Step 4 – Explore ways to integrate conventional and new technologies and their data types into existing and new data management systems.
Step 5 – Implementation, including development of specifications for new data types and standards, policy and systems requirements for “intelligent” asset management.
Collaboration between asset owners (e.g NH, DfT, ORR, European NRAs and Local Authorities), standard/legislative authorities (e.g ISO,IFC), Technology providers, and software companies will provide the key to the delivery of this digital evolution journey. As primary stakeholders, asset owners could establish a Digital Evolution Working Group, or Hub, with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), to bring the industry together to deliver the vision. By establishing a short and a long-term road map and collaborative investment programme, research, trial projects and industry workshops could support the delivery of the five-step programme.
Although ongoing developments in technology will help asset owners progress and improve asset management, without collaboration to a common objective, progress will continue to be slow, sporadic and inefficient, with lessons being relearned in silos.
There are clear benefits for the different stakeholders in collaborating:
Asset owners achieve cost-efficient transformation of their shared specifications, policies and systems; organisational changes become aligned to future ways of working; there is a new focus on investment; they win from early adoption of the best technologies.
Technology and software providers have a pivotal role in scoping the emerging opportunities for applying new data sources to asset management; they get foresight of customer requirements in preparation for system developments.
Standards and legislative authorities obtain the chance to actively influence the direction of change; by supporting the call for new or upgraded standards they ensure that value is also drawn from the current knowledge base.
You can read the publication ‘The Digital Evolution of Highway Infrastructure Asset Management’ here.