Abstract Manager

In 2015, Alberta Transportation (now Alberta Transportation and Economic Corridors) confirmed it would commence a major project to revitalize their current outsourced highway operations and maintenance model.  Part of that revitalization would see the transition of their winter maintenance specification from an input type model (i.e.: equipment specification) to an outcome type model (i.e.: service level specification).  Like most Canadian highway and road asset owners, winter maintenance represents about 50% of the annual O&M budget, so it was critical that any new highway maintenance specification would not only deliver an appropriate outcome, but would be practical, measurable and most importantly affordable.

The challenges in making this transition were numerous and in many cases conflicting depending on whether you were viewing the specification through the perspective of a contract administrator or a contractor.

Specific challenges included:

• Identifying and determining appropriate service levels and performance measures for the following three winter scenarios:
  • Managing snow and ice accumulations during a winter storm
  • Removing or managing snow and ice accumulations following a winter storm
  • Responding to isolated icing and drifting events between winter storms
• Developing a performance framework to incentivize the contractor to meet the performance measures
• Minimizing the cost of quality assurance, performance monitoring and reporting recognizing that every dollar spent on these activities is one dollar not spent on managing highway conditions
• Providing sufficient freedom for the contractor to nominate their equipment and material footprint and winter maintenance methodology in the RFP process whilst carefully balancing the risk of a contractor not having sufficient resources to meet the spec requirements
• Modelling the service levels to determine specification affordability prior to full adoption

In 2022, these challenges (and many others) were overcome and the revised outcome-based winter maintenance specification was advertised in the 2022 Fall RFP package where it’s affordability and response from bidders in a competitively bid scenario were fully tested.

This presentation will explain the technical and non-technical challenges associated with developing this new specification and provide an overview of the processes and analysis completed to derive it.  Attendees of this presentation will greatly benefit from the many hours of experience the team from TEC and WSP have collated in developing this winter maintenance specification.