ANALYSING THE CONDITIONS OF ROAD ASSETS WITH A NETWORK THINKING

Abstract

Road transport is indispensable and requires improvements. The current road asset maintenance practice often treats defects as isolated entities and guides follow-up actions in fragmented documentation. Most of the previous research tended to focus on limited types of road assets, which did not cover defects across different types or consider holistically causes and repair strategies. This research explores relationships between five classes of information, summarizing various road objects into 66 assets, 48 defects, 28 repairs, 27 causes and 39 preventative treatments. Relationships in the network of road asset conditions are built by breaking paragraphs and descriptions of maintenance guidance in the United Kingdom into class-to-class relationships, checked and supplemented by standards from 8 overseas jurisdictions in 4 countries/regions. The network merges segregated road asset failures into a comprehensive network, which contributes to laying the ground rules in automating road maintenance and acts as a precursor to risk and reliability analyses for asset management.