Multi-Attribute Utility Theory approach to value-based infrastructure asset management

Several government regulatory bodies mandate agencies to report their Capital Tangible Assets' (CTA) values within their annual statement. For example, the Canadian Public Sector Accounting Board (PSAB), the Governmental Accounting Standard Board (GASB) and the New Zealand International Financial Reporting Standards (NZ IFRS) to name a few. Using asset valuation financial/ accounting methods alone in reporting asset values may result in underestimating asset values. If the underestimated asset values are used as the basis of annual fund allocation, it may result in insufficient funding to preserve assets and therefore impact the overall network performance. Therefore, it is essential to integrate asset value in asset management systems to effectively manage assets while maintaining or enhancing the value of these assets. This paper introduces a Multi-Attribute Utility-Theory (MAUT) and optimization methodology that integrates asset value as a performance measure in infrastructure network-level asset management decision making. A case study using data from Ministry of Transportation Ontario (MTO) Pavement Management System (PMS2) is used to illustrate the proposed methodology.