Challenge

Asset Management is a business methodology emphasizing lowering costs and generating a high return on investment. CDOT has limited financial resources and must weigh the investment in multiple asset types against the available budget.

Solution

CDOT has developed the Asset Investment Management System (AIMS) which predicts the long-term performance of each asset given various budget scenarios. The data generated by AIMS is used by CDOT decision-makers to determine the allocation of funds to invest in each asset for upcoming fiscal years.

The system facilitates discussion of priorities given the lack of sufficient funding to achieve performance targets for all assets. The CDOT Asset Management Investment System currently analyzes the following asset types:

• Pavements
• Bridges & Culverts
• Buildings
• Fleet Equipment
• Geotechnical Hazards
• ITS Devices
• Traffic Signals
• Tunnels Walls

For each asset, AIMS completes a life-cycle cost analysis using a number of alternative budget scenarios. First, AIMS analyzes a set of budget scenarios that have very close dollar ranges clustered around historical funding and desired funding.

Following the initial set of clustered budgets, AIMS then analyzes a set of budgets using the dTIMS Strategic Analysis Module. This enables CDOT management to quickly assess the impacts of moving large amounts of funding between the different assets.

Finally, CDOT completes a Cross Asset Analysis and Optimization using the dTIMS Cross Asset Optimization functionality in dTIMS. This investigates where additional funding would be allocated based on an incremental benefit cost optimization, where each project for each asset completes for this additional funding. Each asset type is allocated a minimum dedicated amount of funding and then a flexible amount of funding is supplied that each asset can “tap into”. CDOT also establishes a maximum percentage of the flexible funding that can go to any one asset. This prevents one asset from getting all of the flexible funding.

Following the analysis runs, CDOT hosts a budget setting workshop where the results of the AIMS analysis are reviewed for each of the assets and a Delphi process is used to vote on the allocations. The voting results for the budget allocations are then reviewed by the Transportation Asset Management Oversite Committee and presented to the CDOT Transportation Commission for approval. CDOT is a great example where the asset management analysis directly impacts resource allocation.

Results

The AIMS system provides CDOT with an effective method of evaluating budgets for multiple asset types eliminating the siloed asset management approach. The system continues to evolve. The current cross-asset analysis and optimization capability is based on asset condition, however; CDOT plans to incorporate additional criteria in the future.