An Investigation into a Generalised Framework for Pavement Data Asset Management

An objective of pavement asset management (PAM) is long term analysis and decision making. Combined with a better understanding of a network’s maintenance requirements this can lead to an improvement in the overall condition of the network for a given budget. Given the scale and cost required in maintaining a road network, even relatively small increases in the quality of decision making about maintenance needs can lead to significant financial savings network wide. The authors propose that quality PAM decision making is inherently dependent on high quality information. The authors outline a series of engineering methodologies which will achieve improved management of data. The authors propose that pavement data typically collected as an input in PAM is itself a highly valuable asset. Like any asset it can be ‘managed’ in some manner to produce the highest level of performance for a given expenditure. This paper outlines the initial investigations into models required to incorporate pavement data asset management (PDAM) with PAM or wider infrastructure asset management (IAM).