Sue McNeil
Director and Professor
Urban Transportation Center, University of Illinois at Chicago
412 South Peoria St, Suite 340
Chicago Il 60607
312/996-9818, Fax: 312/413-0006, mcneil@uic.edu

The goal of the research is to develop a generic methodology for measuring the benefits derived from implementing an AMS. Benefits are defined as improvements in the transportation agency’s business performance as well as improvements in the system’s performance as perceived by the users. These improvements are derived from the decision support provided by the AMS.

Transportation agencies have identified asset management (AM) as a concept to support cost effective maintenance and rehabilitation decisions related to physical assets. Asset Management Systems (AMS) and tools are required to implement these AM concepts. It is expected that AM improves agencies’ performance in terms of the performance of their assets while it reduces agencies’ cost for maintenance and rehabilitation (M&R). However, agencies seem to hesitate to move forward in implementing AMS and tools because it is difficult to document whether the benefits produced by AMS or tools exceed the costs for implementation and operation. Without showing the relationship between the benefits and the costs, the implementation will not be realized. Indeed six of seven research needs studies conducted since 2000 have identified “Measuring Benefits” as an important area of research to develop the base of support for asset management. Understanding the relationship between the improvement of agencies’ performance and costs for M&R is challenging. A new method is required to measure the benefits of implementing AMS and to demonstrate whether the benefits exceed the AMS implementation and operation costs. The method must be generic and adapt to different AMS and tools, and be applicable to a variety of agencies with different resources.

1) Review the methods of measuring benefits
2) Analyze these methods to determine whether they can be applied to measuring benefits of AMS implementation and address problems identified in the analysis,
3) Develop methods taking into account the strengths and weaknesses found in 2),
4) Perform a case study using the methods developed in 3)
5) Propose generalizable methods
6) Perform an additional case study
7) Discuss the benefits of AMS implementation
8) Discuss the feasibility of using the methods for other assets,
9) Document the methods and case studies in a final report.

14 months - Start date: June 15, 2005; End date: August 15, 2006; Extended to: December 31, 2006