A stochastic multi-criteria assessment of security of transportation assets

Transportation project evaluation and prioritization use traditional performance measures including travel time, safety, user costs, economic efficiency, and environmental quality. The project impacts in terms of enhancing the infrastructure resilience or mitigating the consequences of infrastructure damage in the event of disaster occurrence are rarely considered in project evaluation. This dissertation presents a methodology to address this issue so that in evaluating and prioritizing investments, infrastructure with low security can receive the attention they deserve. Secondly, the methodology can be used for evaluating and prioritizing candidate investments dedicated specifically to security enhancement. In defining security as a function of threat likelihood, asset resilience and damage consequences, this dissertation uses security-related considerations in investment prioritization thus adding further robustness in traditional evaluations. As this leads to an increase in the number of performance criteria in the evaluation, the dissertation adopts a multiple-criteria analysis approach. The methodology quantifies the overall security level for an infrastructure in terms of the threats it faces, its resilience to damage, and the consequences in the event of the infrastructure damage. The dissertation demonstrates that it is feasible to develop a security-related measure that can be used as a performance criterion in the evaluation of general transportation projects or projects dedicated specifically towards security improvement. Through a case study, the dissertation applies the methodology by measuring the risk (and hence, security) of each for bridge infrastructure in Indiana. The method was also fuzzified and a Monte Carlo simulation was run to account for unknown data and uncertainty. On the basis of the multiple types of impacts including risk impacts such as the increase in security due to each candidate investment, this dissertation shows how to prioritize security investments across the multiple infrastructure assets using multiple-criteria analysis

A proposed elemental decomposition and bi-criteria method for asset valuation

The Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB) requires transportation agencies to report the values of their tangible assets. Numerous valuation methods exist which use different underlying concepts and data items. These traditional methods have a number of shortcomings, such as their implicit assumption that assets are monolithic and their inability to simultaneously consider a satisfactory range of value-related asset attributes. In a bid to address these limitations, this thesis proposes a number of valuation methods. The elemental decomposition and bi-criteria (EDBC) method carries out asset valuation on the basis of cost, remaining service life, and the condition of the individual components of an asset. Using the proposed method, bridge and pavement assets, in the state of Indiana, were valued at $5.19B (range:$2.4B-$9.3B) and$37.9B (range: $22.1B-$50B), respectively. The proposed replacement-downtime-salvage (RDS) method considers only the life-cycle costs, including user cost during work zones and recycling benefits or disposal costs. The third proposed method, decommission-and-reuse (D&R), is based on the real-estate value of the land occupied by the asset. Further, on the basis of the unit asset values derived for Indiana, the existing asset inventory of other states, and the state-specific cost factors, the total estimated value of state-owned highway bridge and pavement assets in the United States was estimated at $2.9T or$3.4T using the traditional GASB 34 and the EDBC methods respectively. For all highways in the United States, the estimated values were found to be $13.8B and$16.2B for the GASB 34 and the EDBC methods, respectively. This thesis also shows how the asset value or added asset value could be incorporated as a decision criterion in project evaluation