Allocating financial resources among different sub-assets of a country’s road infrastructure is a challenge that is highly dependent on the strategic priorities and organisational structure of the infrastructure operator. While some agencies in Europe deal with pavements, bridges, tunnels or road furniture completely independently, others find that they have one mutual budget that needs to be shared out among the different assets in a way that represents their respective need for maintenance. The criteria upon which such allocations are based may be political, empirical, or based on stakeholder/user interests. The goal of the project ASCAM – Asset Service Condition Assessment Methodology – was to develop a framework for cross-asset management that can be used to objectively assign a budget to certain assets. While previous research projects have already compiled lists of various key performance indicators, ASCAM aimed to find mutual indices such as an “end user service level” that could be used to judge all sub-assets on equal terms and thus compare their condition on the same scale.

By looking at asset management in the ASCAM partner countries and other European road agencies, the best-practice in individual asset management was extracted to develop the framework and perform a proof-of-concept for the project. While other projects such as PROCROSS within the same ERA-NET call also worked on cross-asset management – but from a top-down approach – ASCAM’s bottom-up approach looked at the more technical aspects of evaluating infrastructure condition and making a budgetary assignment based on the current and predicted state of the assets.