Over the past two decades, asset management practice in transportation asset management (TAM) has been progressing with guidance produced from NCHRP Project 20-24(11), Asset Management Guidance for Transportation Agencies, initiated in 1999 and completed in 2002; NCHRP Project 08-69, Supplement to the AASHTO Transportation Asset Management Guide: Volume 2—A Focus on Implementation (TAM Guide II), initiated in 2008 and completed in 2010; and the current project NCHRP Project 08-109(01), Updating the AASHTO Transportation Asset Management Guide—A Focus on Implementation (TAM Guide III). TAM is an area of great importance to state departments of transportation (DOT) and other transportation agencies. As defined in the transportation legislation Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century (MAP-21), TAM is a “strategic and systematic process of operating, maintaining, and improving physical assets… that will achieve and sustain a desired state of good repair over the life cycle of the assets at minimum practicable cost.” In recent years interest in TAM has intensified in part due to the asset and performance management requirements introduced in MAP-21.

NCHRP Project 08-109, resulting in TAM Guide III, has developed an updated and new version of the existing AASHTO TAM Guide II using a new framework for asset management that has been adapted from the one developed by the UK-based Institute of Asset Management. This project was initiated to improve the existing guide’s effectiveness and thereby advance the practices of public-agency TAM. The research has been conducted in two phases, with the first phase focused on assessing the effectiveness of the current guide and developing a strategy for improving the guide’s effectiveness and presenting the guide in a form well suited to future updating. The second phase focused on developing the new print version of the TAM Guide III, as well as producing a TAM Guide III Digital Guide that will be added to AASHTO’s TAM Portal (http://tam.transportation.org).

With the original project being completed in early 2020, the project panel has focused on both implementation of TAM Guide III and determining additional needs to make the TAM Guide III better based on the original literature research and review. An extensive literature search was conducted as a part of the original NCHRP project phase one work and the results generally incorporated and addressed in the new TAM Guide III; however, because of funding limitations, not all of the desired changes, updates, and enhancements could be addressed. Based on those limitations, the objective of this research is to provide further enhancements and content to the TAM Guide III.