IMPROVING ROAD INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT EFFICIENCY THROUGH DIGITAL ASSET MONITORING SYSTEMS
Keywords:
road infrastructure management, Asset Management Systems, digital monitoring, pavement deterioration modeling, life-cycle cost analysis, maintenance optimization, Pavement Condition Index, infrastructure depreciation, transport economics, UzbekistanAbstract
Road infrastructure underpins economic connectivity in landlocked transition economies, yet accelerating freight volumes and constrained public budgets have intensified pavement depreciation across Uzbekistan's national and regional highway network. This study investigates whether digital Asset Management Systems (AMS) and automated condition monitoring can raise the efficiency of road maintenance compared with conventional reactive repair practices. Drawing on an empirical cohort of 1,200 lane-kilometers of highway segments observed over a multiyear horizon, the research combines a Pavement Condition Index (PCI) decay model with Life-Cycle Cost Analysis (LCCA) expressed as net present value, incorporating capital, maintenance, rehabilitation, user-delay, and salvage components discounted over a fifteen-year planning period. Data inputs included International Roughness Index readings, rutting depth, surface distress records, Annual Average Daily Traffic, and regional climatic load coefficients. An optimization routine minimized life-cycle expenditure subject to maintaining network-average PCI above the serviceability threshold. Results show that predictive, sensor-guided maintenance extends pavement service life by roughly one-quarter relative to reactive management and reduces fifteen-year discounted rehabilitation expenditure by more than one-fifth, while sensitivity analysis confirms robustness across discount rates and freight-loading scenarios. Preventive interventions generated benefit-cost ratios exceeding 2.5 by intercepting micro-cracking before moisture penetrates the pavement subbase. The findings support institutionalizing a unified digital road cadastre, performance-based maintenance contracting, automated weigh-in-motion enforcement, and ringfenced maintenance financing as coordinated instruments. For Uzbekistan's transport authorities, these measures offer a pathway from budget-driven reactive spending toward condition-based, fiscally sustainable infrastructure stewardship, with direct relevance for CAREC and TRACECA corridor investment planning and long-term national network resilience.
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