Abstract Manager

The New Brunswick Department of Transportation and Infrastructure (NBDTI) has an emerging Geotechnical Asset Management (GAM) program that was developed while keeping in mind the recommendations of the U.S. National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Report 903 guidelines.  The NBDTI Transportation Asset Management (TAM) now includes GAM along with the more established pavement asset management and bridge asset management programs.  After six years of GAM data collection, trials, and modifications to suit the resources within NBDTI, the program is moving from the testing stage to use in generating the highway maintenance program. 

The NBDTI GAM program is best described using terms from the NCHRP guidelines as being at its lowest level of maturity. With high motivation and limited economic ability within NBDTI, the advice taken from the guidelines is to have a simple program with low financial needs.  This was implemented with the hope that it would stand the greatest likelihood of adoption.  Once started, there was trust that the GAM program could mature with time as suggested by the NCHRP Report 903.  Using this idea, the NBDTI GAM’s slow growth and slow maturity rate does not distract from the Agency seeing GAM as a beneficial program.  This paper describes the goals of NBDTI’s GAM program and how it aligns with NBDTI’s other mature asset management programs mentioned above.   GAM Condition Assessment and Risk-Level categories are described and leads to a candidate list of projects to be included in the departments three and five-year maintenance plan.

NBDTI manages four GAM asset categories.  These categories are embankments, slopes, subgrade, and retaining walls.  This is consistent with the recommended categories in the NCHRP guidelines.  Embankments are by far the largest category of the four.  The challenge of the program is to have a simple, low-cost system that obtains real measurable data comparable to and recognized by other transportation agencies.  The barrier to implementation of GAM at NBDTI is that complex criteria for condition and risk assessment would severely limit the departments capability to gather GAM sites. The detailed risk assessment and life cycle cost analysis can be addressed at the design stage of the road maintenance project. The process, levels of inspection, and the goal of complete GAM coverage for every kilometer of the 18000 km of roadway in New Brunswick, is described in this paper.