Whole life cycle costing for Highway Infrastructure Maintenance

Vol. 1 No.1

Year: 2011

Issue: Dec-Feb

Title: Whole life cycle costing for Highway Infrastructure Maintenance 

Author Name: Renica C. Mapfunde, John P. Davis , Mark Hall , Steve Jones 

Synopsis: 

The UK Highways Agency (HA) is responsible for the operating, maintaining and continual improvement of the strategic road network in England which is made up of 14 asset groups. This public asset valued at about £88 billion and handles traffic volumes of nearly 140 billion vehicle kilometres a year requires about £900 million every year (NAO, 2009) to maintain it in a safe, serviceable and sustainable condition. This paper demonstrates that effective highway asset management requires the asset owner to optimally and sustainably manage their asset and asset systems, their associated performance, risks and maintenance costs over the asset’s whole life cycle to ensure that the asset demonstrates value for money over the long-term and that it fulfils its stakeholder requirements. There is a lack of good quality current and historical data that can be used to prioritise asset intervention activities and to minimise whole life cycle costs (WLCC). This research paper presents work done to date to develop four deterioration models for four highway asset groups.