Nowadays transportation authorities are facing severe financial pressures, highlighting the need to develop risk-based asset management and financial plans.
An efficient process for asset management must define methods and tools for tracking assets, managing maintenance activity, determining the lifecycle and replacement costs of assets, assisting in defining funding strategies, optimising capital investments in operation and maintenance, and helping with the replacement of assets.
However, existing infrastructure asset management approaches generally focus on the later stages of a facility’s lifecycle only, in particular maintenance, rehabilitation and replacement. As a result, processes used to manage the procurement, design, construction, exploitation and public communication stages of a project are not multimodal but rather focused on individual assets. In addition, they are not correctly linked, which hinders the exchange of information between different stakeholders.
The European RAGTIME (Risk based approaches for Asset inteGrity multimodal Transport Infrastructure ManagEment) project officially launched in September. It aims to establish a common framework for the governance, management and finance of transport infrastructure projects in order to ensure the best possible return from limited investment funds. It will deliver an innovative management approach together with a system planning software platform that will facilitate the holistic management of transport infrastructures throughout their entire lifecycle.
The system will provide an integrated view of a risk-based approach, implementing risk-based models, resilient concepts and mitigation actions with specific reference to climate change related threats. The whole system will be demonstrated and validated in three regional flagship projects: a road scenario in Italy, a railway scenario in Slovenia and a multi-modal scenario in the UK.
In the project, LGI will establish a generic stakeholder mapping suitable for all types of transport infrastructures and will report on their current business models and highlight potential weaknesses and opportunities. A state of the art analysis will be conducted to identify innovative business models that could be implemented to address previously reported issues.
Project Partners: Tecnalia (Spain), D’Appolonia (Italy), University of Cantabria (Spain), Acciona (Spain), Louis Berger (Spain), SZI (Slovenia), AON (Italy), FEHRL (Belgium), Antea (Italy), Smartec (Switzerland), ZAG (Slovenia), Aiscat (Italy), Network Rail NR (UK)
Contact us: Mathieu Salel, Innovation Consultant