The relationship between condition and remaining useful life seems to be very complex for most asset types, with factors such as usage, climate, weather, geology, construction technique and many other variables effecting the life of an asset.
I have a very strong suspicion that collecting enough data to build up accurate condition deterioration profiles for most asset types with the technology available today would be prohibitively expensive.
I think for this reason asset management has so far promised more than it can deliver.
I do think there is light at the end of the tunnel though.
Google has recently showed that self driving cars aren't far away, and I think that when it becomes obvious to enough people that computer assisted driving is very much safer than human-in-charge driving not only will automatic cars become more common, their use will eventually be mandated.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/10/google-has-robotic-self-driving-cars.html
The Google cars use LIDAR, radar and video cameras to navigate, and I would expect that this technology could be used to simultaneously collect road condition and traffic volume information.
I also believe that with computational power doubling every 18 months (Moore's Law), by the time a reasonable number of these high tech cars are on the road, the cost of compiling, storing and analysing the huge amount of data that would be collected, will be low enough to allow for real time road condition and traffic volume information over entire road networks.
Imagine a report arriving in your inbox every week advising you of the current condition of and the volume of traffic using every single road segment in your municipality.
It is not science fiction. Large fleets of self-driving highly computerised cars are just around the corner. We need to start lobbying now to ensure that they also collect road condition and traffic data for us now.
As Sam Kekovich would say. "You know its true".
Wayne Eddy
Melbourne, Australia
LGAM Knowledge Base
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