New Brunswick Department of Transportation – Taking the Politics Out of Paving: Achieving Transportation Asset Management Excellence via Operations Research
The Problem
Today we increasingly hear of crumbling public civil infrastructure—highways, roads, and bridges—and a chronic lack of funding to maintain it. The New Brunswick Department of Transportation (NBDoT) maintains the largest per-capita inventory of transportation assets in Canada. With 18,000 km of roads, 2,900 km of bridges, and various ferry crossings, it is one of many jurisdictions facing significant challenges as it strives to efficiently and effectively maintain its billions of dollars of infrastructure assets built over generations.
NBDoT was challenged with maintaining a sufficient level of service throughout the province in the form of a quality, safe, and effective transportation system and a limited budget. The department believed that their current level of funding for infrastructure renewal was much lower than what was required to maintain the roads in an acceptable condition, but the department lacked the method to clearly demonstrate this to decision makers.
Their goal was to develop a strategic plan for managing New Brunswick’s highway infrastructure using investment-minded thinking. As a public organization accountable to the taxpayers, the department had to ensure that the plans were competent, transparent, and defensible, enabling buy-in from decision makers and support from the public. For the NBDoT, the complexity was significant, and developing a solution to manage, maintain, and operate a safe, efficient, and sustainable transportation network was essential.
The Analytics Solution
As a proof of concept, the NBDoT first developed a limited-scope prototype. The NBDoT team built a basic linear programming model to help evaluate what new or different insights could be generated and how better decisions could be developed using this approach. Results showed that the traditional planning methods could not address the exponential deterioration of the highway infrastructure, whereas the new approach offered a feasible and defensible plan with improved conditions at a lower life-cycle cost.
The analytics component of the framework, developed by Remsoft, uses a unique combination of linear programming and heuristic techniques for a goal-based approach. The model incorporates long-term objectives and constraints from an operations-wide view that weighs all options; considers costs, timings, and asset life cycles; and produces optimal treatment plans and schedules of activities.
The Value
The result of the initial analysis offered the substantiation required to secure a three-year commitment from the government for a 200% increase over the current funding level. The increased funding helped address the growing infrastructure deficit, allowed the NBDoT to maintain the required levels of service, and assisted the local road-building industry by stabilizing funding. Furthermore, the NBDoT realized $72 million (discounted) in savings for the taxpayer annually as a return on its $2 million investment; this amounts to $1.4 billion (discounted) over the 20-year planning cycle. As of 2009, there were 1,200 fewer kilometers of poor roads than there would have been under the traditional funding and approach, and over the next few years it is projected that this trend will increase.
In use operationally for three years, the system has been effectively used to develop the department’s annual multimillion dollar rehabilitation capital budget for the past three years. Future program development capital budgets will see highway fixtures and ferries added to the model. The Department of Transportation has become a global leader in the field of asset management, and the success has attracted the attention of transportation officials around the world. The solution has been one of the key points in the premier’s throne speeches. Generous media coverage has been directed at the solution, even to the extent of editorial cartoons. In addition, other government departments have been requesting NBDoT assistance and guidance with respect to the management of their respective assets.
