Transportation asset management is a decision-making process for making cost-effective decisions about the design, construction, maintenance, rehabilitation retrofit, replacement, and abandonment of (transportation) assets, with the objective of maintaining or improving the value of these assets over time.
Infrastructure management systems, most usually designed as computer-assisted decision support systems, are based on the inventory and physical condition data of transportation facilities.
Most systems contain data on the causes and indicators of deterioration.
These data are used to develop deterioration relationships to estimate the future system conditions under various demands or loads. The more sophisticated systems also employ priority assessment methods for ranking or optimizing projects under budgetary constraints.
In addition to these elements, integrated asset management systems include procedures for system valuation and analysis of investment trade-offs for multiple modes of transportation infrastructure.