Tunnel Asset Management: Drafting a Methodology to Optimize Maintenance Programs

Highways are among the infrastructures that form the strategic backbone of a country. Effective highway maintenance improves safety, enhances service quality, and reduces CO2emissions. This study aims to answer the following research question: “How can an asset management system for highway infrastructures be designed?”. The paper presents an applied research project carried out in collaboration with a major Italian highway concessionaire, focusing on the development of an asset management tool for highway tunnels. In particular, a group of seven tunnels located in northern Italy, is analyzed over a period of approximately twenty years. This study outlines the preliminary methodology adopted, which includes: (i) developing a digital model that, using degradation models as input, forecasts the quality status over time; (ii) modeling maintenance projects and their impact on degradation; (iii) enabling the creation of different intervention scenarios for each tunnel or group of tunnels, each with varying costs, risk levels, impacts on traffic, and service quality; (iv) developing a software tool integrated with a GIS system to allow intuitive and graphical use of the model; and (v) creating an asset-level optimizer to suggest the best overall intervention scenarios. The method is expected to act as a decision support system for optimized maintenance project portfolio management for the highway concessionaire.