Highway Asset Management under Risk and Uncertainty

Efficient highway asset management that provides tools to facilitate a more organized, logical approach to achieve truly optimal investment decisions becomes increasingly important. Highway project evaluation and project selection are key steps in the investment decision-making process. This text introduces a generalized methodology for highway project evaluation that offers flexibility for the decision-maker to consider any combination of input factors such as project costs, traffic demand, and discount rates under certainty, risk or uncertainty in the estimation of project-level agency and user benefits. It could estimate the amount of benefits associated with project sub-level agency or user benefit items (if further separable) under certainty, risk or uncertainty in accordance with available information. It also proposes stochastic optimization models, along with an efficient solution algorithm, for project selection that explicitly address budget uncertainty. The new methodology and models can be adopted by transportation agencies to achieve globally optimal investment decisions.