00738830

Component

First-generation maintenance management systems (MMSs) that were developed in the 1960s-1970s were oriented toward establishing a rational, objective basis for planning and tracking maintenance accomplishments and costs, and delivering maintenance services more efficiently. The level of maintenance itself was assumed to be uniform throughout a State and unchanging over time, and, with only a few notable exceptions, little attention was given to identifying the benefits of maintenance performed. Several trends are now redirecting attention toward maintenance levels of service and the benefits thereof, which accrue to the agency or to its customers. Among these trends are the following: (1) the composition of the highway program continues to shift from new construction to preservation, focusing increased attention at the executive and legislative levels on understanding better what the maintenance budget buys; (2) the success of new analytic tools in pavement, bridge, and capital program management has gained wider acceptance for these methods, and encouraged their spread to other domains such as highway maintenance; and (3) the movement toward a customer-oriented or outcome-oriented maintenance management approach has brought with it a need to estimate measures of customer satisfaction. Maintenance activities are numerous and diverse, and some more amenable to quantification than others. It is likely that some blend of quantitative and qualitative benefit measures will likely be a first step in "setting up" the problem in future MMSs. The California Department of Transportation recognized this idea fairly early in the history of MMS development (1971), with the use of an "impact tableau" that captured the estimated impacts of potential changes in maintenance budget levels. More recently, the NCHRP has sponsored the development of procedures based upon decision analysis theory. Another approach that is gaining currency in the U.S. and overseas is to involve road users in assessments of maintenance levels of service and the benefits derived from that service, e.g., through customer surveys and focus groups. This paper complements these developments by outlining efforts that will be needed to quantify benefits of maintenance for use in benefit-cost analyses and customer-satisfaction indicators where possible. Activities related to pavement and bridge maintenance have benefited from the considerable research and management system development that has occurred in those fields. Benefits models have also been investigated for other groups of maintenance activities, e.g., traffic services, guardrail repair, snow and ice control, and sign washing. Models have been estimated successfully for some of these activity groups; in other cases, however, the available data are sketchy or contradictory, typifying the problems involved and suggesting further research needs. Where models have been successfully developed, they have been incorporated in recommendations for customer-oriented performance measures for the next-generation maintenance management approaches in State DOTs.

This preprint was duplicated from a camera-ready copy provided by the author(s) and has not been subjected to the formal TRB peer review process or edited.

PREPRINT F-2

English

17p

1997

Eighth AASHTO/TRB Maintenance Management Conference

Figures (3) ; References (15)

Benefit cost analysis; Benefits; Customer satisfaction; Customers; Estimating; Highway maintenance; Level of service; Maintenance management; Quantitative analysis

Quantifying

Highways; Maintenance and Preservation; I60: Maintenance

TRIS, TRB

Jul 7 1997 12:00AM