Investment Decisions

FHWA defines asset management as “a strategic and systematic process of operating, maintaining, and improving physical assets, with a focus on engineering and economic analysis based upon quality information, to identify a structured sequence of maintenance, preservation, repair, rehabilitation, and replacement actions that will achieve and sustain a desired state of good repair over the lifecycle of the assets at minimum practicable cost.” To support the practices of asset management, CDOT has developed the Asset Investment Management System (AIMS), which forecasts the long-term performance of each asset given various budget scenarios.  The data generated by AIMS is used by CDOT decision-makers to determine the allocation of funds to invest in each asset for upcoming fiscal years. The system facilitates discussion of priorities given the lack of sufficient funding to achieve performance targets for all assets. 

Current efforts to improve AIMS include refining the information used by the system for each asset, and developing a cross-asset optimization capability.  The current cross-asset analysis and optimization capability is based on asset condition, however CDOT plans to incorporate additional criteria in the future.