Infrastructure asset managers and owners continuously face the challenge of improving their tasks, which depend heavily on collecting asset data, keeping an inventory, and ensuring the data is updated regularly.
Reliable and robust asset data also help asset owners and managers make sound decisions, including investment decisions or where investment should go, when, and how much.
Asset managers and owners must ensure that infrastructure assets continue to provide and meet customers’ expected service levels in the face of limited funds and deteriorating infrastructure assets needs.
Asset managers and owners increasingly rely on technology for data collection and keeping a record of assets and their conditions.
According to Insite, when it comes to collecting data on the road or road network condition, asset managers are required to gather information based on these “six whats” of asset management:
- What and where is the asset?
- What is it worth?
- What is the condition?
- What is its remaining service life?
- What maintenance is required and when?
- What should I fix first?
In the last ten years, England’s Department for Transport (DfT) has required their local highway authorities – all 150 of them – to provide detailed information using indicators for their road conditions. The regulation proved a costly exercise. Data collected by local highway authorities turned out insufficient and was not very useful for developing a maintenance and rehabilitation program.
Thankfully, computer innovations have helped England’s local highway authorities to collect data on road conditions cost-effectively. Utilizing digital mapping and data capture technology supplied them with high-definition imagery of highway networks that is collected and analyzed, providing them deep insights into roads and the roadscape.
Insite reports that the UK’s local highway authorities work with a digital mapping company, Gaist, with timely annual inventory and condition data to address those ‘six whats’ and, more importantly, to use that data to develop long-term practical and implementable forward programs of work.
The company uses an innovative camera mounted on a vehicle that scans the area to detect the condition of roads and highways and identify roadside assets such as lighting columns, road signs, and traffic lights, providing complete roadscape coverage.
The company stores this raw imagery data in a storage facility, and the data can be accessed anywhere in the world where the internet is available.
Over 60 local highway authorities in England use this digital mapping technology annually. The technology has also been introduced in Perth, SE Queensland, and New Zealand, where it has undergone trials and condition surveys to develop a more cost-effective data collection process with a proven and reliable engineering and technical process for asset condition assessment.
Technological innovations like digital mapping technology are explicitly designed to assess transportation assets and provide detailed data on their conditions.
They can assist asset owners and managers in making better decisions regarding the maintenance and rehabilitation of assets, guide elected officers on how to optimize or where to prioritize investments, inform them of the conditions of existing assets, and help them understand the importance of carrying out the maintenance or rehabilitation of existing assets and the risk of delaying it.
Source:
Sponsored Article by Essency Consulting: Breaking Ground: Next-Generation Road Condition Surveying Technology. (2023, May 19). Retrieved from https://insite.ipwea.org/sponsored-article-by-essency-consulting-breaking-ground-next-generation-road-condition-surveying-technology/
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