Although transportation agencies in the U.S. have been developing Asset Management Systems (AMS) for specific types of infrastructure assets, there are several barriers to the implementation of AMS. This paper documents the development of a generic methodology for quantifying the benefits derived from implementation of AMS and justifying investment in AMS implementation. The generic methodology involves three analysis methods: descriptive analysis, regression analysis, and benefit-cost analysis. This paper demonstrates how the methodology can be applied to evaluate the implementation of a pavement management system in terms of efficacy, effectiveness, and efficiency (3Es).

This monograph provides a comprehensive overview of methods for searching, evaluating, and optimizing highway location and alignments using genetic algorithms (GAs), a powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) technique. It presents a two-level programming structure to deal with the effects of varying highway location on traffic level changes in surrounding road networks within the highway location search and alignment optimization process. In addition, the proposed method evaluates environmental impacts as well as all relevant highway costs associated with its construction, operation, and maintenance. The monograph first covers various search methods, relevant cost functions, constraints, computational efficiency, and solution quality issues arising from optimizing the highway alignment optimization (HAO) problem. It then focuses on applications of a special-purpose GA in the HAO problem where numerous highway alignments are generated and evaluated, and finally the best ones are selected based on costs, traffic impacts, safety, energy, and environmental considerations. A review of other promising optimization methods for the HAO problem is also provided in this monograph.

Benefit-Cost Analysis (BCA) aids in making capital investment decisions by determining whether the benefits of a proposed action justify its costs. This synthesis, Effective Practices for Preparing Airport Improvement Program Benefit-Cost Analysis, defines and describes benefit assessment techniques used by airports as well as other modes, highlights best practices, and identifies inconsistencies of how benefits are calculated and where there is confusion in the benefit-cost guidance published by the FAA. The project focused on a review of benefit-cost literature, including benefit-cost analyses submitted to the FAA, and structured interviews with airport managers and other applicants, consultants who prepared BCA studies, and FAA staff. BCA is a tool to aid agencies in project selection and prioritization. At its core, it is a computational tool to determine whether an investment will generate benefits that will exceed its costs. This analysis is accomplished by expressing all current and future benefits and costs on an equivalent basis, which is their present value (PV). A project is economically efficient if it has a positive Net Present Value (calculated as the PV of benefits minus the PV of costs), and hence also a Benefit-Cost Ratio exceeding one.