Infrastructure Rating Tool: Using Decision Support Tools to Enhance ASCE Infrastructure Report Card Process

ASCE has been developing and releasing periodic reports on the status of the nation's infrastructure since 1998. Over the years periodic reports on infrastructure status have also been developed for several states and local jurisdictions. Infrastructure reporting is helpful for sending political decision makers and their constituencies messages about the relative urgency of investing in civil infrastructure in the context of other national priorities, such as education, health care, and security. Periodic infrastructure reporting is also a formal exercise that states and local agencies can use to demonstrate their accountability as infrastructure stewards. This paper presents a decision support tool that was developed to enhance the infrastructure report card process in the state of Georgia. The Infrastructure Rating Tool (IRT) is based on multiple attribute decision making (MADM) and helps the evaluator to make more explicit the scoring criteria used to evaluate the different infrastructure categories, the weights assigned to these criteria to develop an aggregate score, and the scale used in determining the final grade. The tool was developed based on the 2009 ASCE Report Card methodology and first applied in the release of the 2009 ASCE Georgia Infrastructure Report Card. Given that there are subjective elements in the infrastructure reporting process, decision support tools such as the IRT can help to make the process more transparent and objective, and result in the development of more credible decision support information.