Comparison of Asset Management Approaches to Optimize Navigable Waterway Infrastructure

An estimated investment gap of $176 billion needs to be filled over the next ten years to improve America's inland waterway transportation systems. Many of these infrastructure systems are now beyond their original 50-year design life and are often behind in maintenance due to funding constraints. Therefore, long-term maintenance strategies (i.e., asset management (AM) strategies) are needed to optimize investments across these waterway systems to improve their condition. Two common AM strategies include policy-driven maintenance and performance-driven maintenance. Currently, limited research exists on selecting the optimal AM approach for managing inland waterway transportation assets. Therefore, the goal of this study is to provide a decision model that can be used to select the optimal alternative between the two AM approaches by considering key uncertainties such as asset condition, asset test results, and asset failure. We achieve this goal by addressing the decision problem as a single-criterion problem, which calculates each alternative's expected value and certain equivalence using allocated monetary values to determine the recommended alternative for optimally maintaining navigable waterways. The decision model considers estimated and predicted values based on the current state of the infrastructure. This research concludes that the performance-based approach is the optimal alternative based on the expected value obtained from the analysis. This research sets the stage for further studies on fiscal constraints that will effectively optimize these assets condition.