Dynamic contracting

Abstract

Infrastructure road network is a complex system in a fast changing complicated environment and therefore subject to change. The changes refer to demands, requirements, regulations and financial possibilities as well as advanced technologies. Therefore outsourcing maintenance activities are rather difficult. In result, increasing complexity and changes severely affects the asset management strategies of transportation agencies and reduces their ability to control the maintenance activities. In this case, current traditional contracting based on fixed price lack the capability of dealing with changes to provide improved level of services. The main question is how to do outsourcing of the maintenance activities in this context. Implementation of effective and efficient delivery of services could be mentioned as the goal of agencies for their assets. This paper summarizes and explains the key challenges and preliminary findings with respect to performance parameters of changing circumstances within process of controlling the maintenance activities of managing the outsourcing in the Dutch road network system. A framework is introduced to describe the dynamic behavior of the network that enables to support goal controlled dynamic interaction of network assets, performance measurements and changing circumstances.