Performance contracting means that a principal (a representative of the public sector) and an agent (a commercial enterprise) sign a contract on the construction and maintenance of a road. The difference compared with today's more common contracting giving a number of technical specifications to be fulfilled is that the performance based contract rather states the performance or functionality of the road that has to be fulfilled during thecontracting period. As a part of a VTI project considered the specification and suggestion of road surface parameters related to functionality, which should be used to measure the performance of road. Even though there isa generally expressed desire to have more performance based contracts thenumber of contracts has not increased very much over the past years. A performance contract must be very precise with respect to which parameters are to be included in the contract and how the respective performance parameters will remunerate or penalise the contractor. There must consequently also be ways and means to monitor the performance. Four reasons for the low number of contracts that are truly performance based are: lack of suitable measures; unknown quality among the measuring/monitoring methods; uncertain roles regarding responsibility among entrepreneurs and road owners; and uncertainty of threshold levels. This paper will deal with the first reason, i.e. selection of suitable measures and how they relate to the road surface functionality. For the covering abstract see ITRD E139491.
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