Risk-Based Management of Ancillary Transportation Assets: Applying the Delphi Method to Estimate the Risk of Failure

Although their consequences of failure can sometimes be catastrophic, ancillary transportation assets such as earth retaining structures, culverts, guardrails, embankments, rock-fall supports, and traffic signals and their hardware have received relatively less focus in transportation asset management to date because of their lower rates of failure. Nevertheless, some notable failures around the country have resulted in loss of life, economic benefits as well as public trust. To minimize these kinds of negative outcomes, transportation agencies have made efforts to systematically incorporate these asset classes in their asset management systems. However, the challenge is sometimes to identify which asset classes are of higher priority as agencies typically cannot address all assets at once. In the context of the national surface transportation legislation: Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st century Act, which emphasizes risk-based asset management, this paper proposes a risk-analysis approach, employing the Delphi method, to prioritize asset classes that are under the jurisdiction of a transportation agency for inclusion into formal asset management programs. A Delphi study was conducted to identify asset classes that pose the highest levels of threat to the goals of a transportation agency and to rank the relative likelihoods of occurrence of these threats. The paper demonstrates that the Delphi method can be used to gather expert opinion to identify and prioritize high-risk ancillary transportation asset classes within a transportation network.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABC40 Transportation Asset Management.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Boadi, Richard S
  • Amekudzi, Adjo A
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC
  • Date: 2014-1-12 to 2014-1-16
• Date: 2014

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 17p
• Monograph Title: TRB 93rd Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Asset management; Delphi method; Risk analysis; Risk management
• Identifier Terms: Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act
• Uncontrolled Terms: Ancillary structures; Network prioritization
• Subject Areas: Maintenance and Preservation; Planning and Forecasting; Transportation (General); I61: Equipment and Maintenance Methods; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01515647
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 14-2795
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 24 2014 5:00PM