The introduction of the Highways Agency's Pavement Management System (HAPMS) required the resolution of a number of complex linked technical activities. Only when these had been resolved was it possible to introduce economic assessment and prioritisation, using whole-life cost principles, into the management of the Highways Agency's annual #400m structural maintenance pavement programme. The Highways Agency (HA) was formed in 1994 as an executive agency of the Department of Transport with responsibilities for the maintenance and management of 6,500 miles of motorway and trunk roads. In 1994 it decided to proceed with the HAPMS project, which included the development and implementation of two innovative technical features. Firstly the collection of pavement data at high-speed covering both surface and structural condition, was made possible by the use of an innovative method that collects surface information by a high speed video line scan techniques under controlled lighting conditions. The accompanying automatic image processing can then identify surface defects. Secondly the system can combine these data into recognisable potential maintenance schemes using recently developed deterioration models for discrete sections of the network based on collected condition data. These models utilise the condition projection technique on the collected defects. This enables the user to take account of the economics of alternative maintenance treatments when deciding where and wen treatments should occur. The selected maintenance schemes are then prioritised and budgeted on an incremental economic basis using whole-life cost techniques. The implementation took place during a period of severe budgetary restraint in the United Kingdom, and was only possible by the use of Private Finance under a central government initiative. This innovative funding approach to procurement, the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), offers benefits in terms of reduced timescale to implementation, transfer of risk from the client to contractor and the flexibility in negotiating an acceptable deal to the client. For HAPMS this enabled the project to proceed in 1995, which is now aimed at delivering the predicted annual benefits of #15m to the Highways Agency and hence to the United Kingdom economy. (A)
Samenvatting