A critical component of transportation asset management, asset valuation has been applied historically largely to provide condition-based value assessments of transportation infrastructure. There are emerging opportunities for innovations in asset valuation methodology with applications in the MAP-21/FAST performance-based era, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). Opportunities exist to incorporate a wider range of value factors to capture multiple objectives in planning, design, and rehabilitation, such as safety, mobility, economic advancement, resilience, sustainability, and equity, to reflect the growing importance of intangible assets, as well as consider more explicitly value-adding technologies in this era of smarter infrastructure and rapid technological change. The paper first examines existing methods in transportation asset valuation practice and trends in asset valuation thinking through a literature review on asset valuation methodology with transportation applications. It then outlines innovation pathways and future research directions in asset valuation that can enhance existing capabilities to capture an expanding notion of transportation infrastructure value in the 21st century. For transportation professionals with continuing interest in valuation approaches to enhance asset management, this paper offers a catalog for identifying appropriate valuation approaches. For researchers and practitioners interested in pursuing innovations to secure increasingly smart, effective, and efficient transportation systems, the paper outlines innovation pathways and research directions enabled by growing computing power and data collection capabilities in the 4IR.
Transportation infrastructure around the world is under pressure to perform with ever-changing climate scenarios, unpredictable disasters, and stress on resources stemming from rapid urbanization and population growth. Current approaches to developing resilience applied to the transportation system focus primarily on engineering resilience and do not explicitly deal with deep uncertainties arising from climate change. This paper reviews adaptation, a critical aspect of a resilient system in an uncertain and changing environment, as applied in the transportation resilience literature. It compares and contrasts the status of adaptive resiliency in transportation with that in other fields to highlight gaps and research opportunities. The paper then presents Dynamic Adaptive Planning (DAP) as a method for dealing more effectively with deep uncertainty in decision making and offers an approach that combines economic analysis with DAP to enhance decision making under external uncertainties, such as natural disasters, with financial constraints. It presents a case study of the San Francisco–Oakland Bridge to demonstrate the economic benefits of DAP. This paper provides transportation practitioners with guidance on the application of DAP and insight into the economic benefits of such an approach to decision making in various settings including emergency response planning, long-range planning, maintenance and renewal planning, and operations planning. The paper also identifies areas for possible future research combining financial theory with DAP as important in developing more robust decision-making frameworks for handling deep uncertainty.
Incorporating adaptive resilience as a core value of transportation systems will equip transportation agencies to better address the increasing pace of future changes—both in climate and transportation system performance demands. Quantifiable measures are instrumental in incorporating adaptive resilience in agency organizational frameworks. This paper presents a dashboard tool that evaluates the maturity of adaptive resilience capabilities of a transportation agency, using an Adaptive Resilience (AR) Capability Maturity Model. A demonstrative example is presented to show the potential application of the dashboard tool and its implications for transportation system resilience planning. The example shows how the tool can facilitate identification of adaptive resilience capabilities that are at low maturity and thus may need prioritization for future resilience investments, and capabilities that are at a high maturity level and thus can be leveraged to enhance the lower-level capabilities. The AR performance dashboard tool may be used by transportation agencies to communicate their adaptive resilience efforts and maturity to stakeholders. It can also be used by practitioners to streamline and prioritize process improvements in adaptive resilience efforts.
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