Project Asset Management for Pavement Assets under Performance-Based Contracts

Over the last two decades, there has been a movement in North America towards performance based contract (PBC) models for maintaining and managing road networks. In traditional method-based contracts, the owner agency specifies techniques, materials, methods, quantities, along with the time period for the contract. In contrast, in PBC, the client agency specifies certain clearly defined minimum performance measures to be met or exceeded during the contract period. PBC is a type of contract in which payments are explicitly linked to the contractor successfully meeting or exceeding certain clearly defined minimum performance indicators. Therefore, the PBC model maintenance and rehabilitation selection differs significantly from that of traditional asset management contract, and is more complex due to the pavement deterioration process and probability of failure to achieve the specified level of service (LOS) for various performance measures along the contract period. PBC tenure typically ranges from 3–10 years and could be extended to 30 years due to the nature of periodic maintenance and rehabilitation. In addition, pavement deterioration follows a stochastic behaviour, and the deterioration process and the improvement due to maintenance and rehabilitation activities varies based on many factors such as environment, traffic loading, material properties, and data used for the modelling, which results in a risk to the awarded contractor in such contract models. This paper presents a novel framework for post-award project asset management (PAM) of assets under PBC. A case study using data from the Ministry of Transportation Ontario (MTO) second generation pavement management system (PMS2) and previously published work by the authors of this paper is presented to illustrate the framework.