An efficient and accurate inventory of a state highway agency's assets, along with the means to assess the condition of those assets and model their performance is critical to enabling an agency to make informed investment decisions in a Transportation Asset Management (TAM) environment. Today, new technologies provide fast and improved ways to gather, process, and analyze data. The key is to identify the information and assess how much of it is needed to make informed decisions that affect the assets. The data must be useful, reliable, cost-effective to obtain, and delivered in a timely fashion in a user- friendly format that can tie into existing management systems. The NCDOT Office of Asset Management has identified four infrastructure areas as the primary asset components, which are pavements, bridges, geotechnical features, and roadside appurtenances. In each area, the asset management database includes four categories of data: identification, location, description, and quality. That is, for each component, the database names it, locates it, defines and describes it and explains how well it functions. Although the general requirements for these four data categories are basically the same for the four focal areas, the nature of data collection may differ, depending on the asset type. Various issues in the asset data collection process include precision, subjectivity, and variability of the process itself, as well as speed, safety of the survey crew, proximity of the public, cost, etc. The best way to evaluate these various equipment and technique issues is to set up a sealed envelope experiment wherein the identification, location, description and quality of the asset data elements are known only to an independent evaluator, but the vendors participating in the evaluation are informed of only the data necessary to perform their evaluation. Such an experimental program has been initiated by FHWA, and has resulted in a National Workshop on Highway Asset Inventory and Data Collection to be held in September 2008. To support the workshop, various asset data elements in each focal area have been identified. Also, the NCDOT Pavement Management Unit has identified a 113-mile test course near Raleigh, North Carolina. This test course provides a wide range of roadway classifications, road geometry, pavement and shoulder types, conditions and types of data elements, terrain and vegetation. With these resources available, now the needs are: the development of an experimental design for the vendor testing, ground truth testing of the test sections, analysis of the data from vendors to compare against the ground truth measurements, and a report of the findings at the workshop.

1. Develop experimental designs for the vendor testing and ground truth testing. 2. Perform ground truth testing 3. Analyze the ground truth test results and the vendors; test results from the vendor testing using statistical methods 4. Develop recommendations for the method of collection of the critical asset data elements

North Carolina State University would be retained by the North Carolina Department of Transportation to provide assistance in the principle tasks listed below: 1. Determination and Prioritization of Data Elements 2. Test Site Selection 3. Experimental Design 4. Ground Truth Testing 5. Vendor Testing 6. Data Analysis 7. National Workshop on Highway Asset Inventory and Data Collection 8. Proceedings and Final Report