Departments of transportation (DOTs) manage extensive bridge inventories while facing increasing pressure from aging infrastructure, extreme weather events, and evolving federal requirements for risk-informed asset management. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) requires DOTs to develop and maintain Transportation Asset Management Plans (TAMPs) that address risk management for National Highway System (NHS) pavements and bridges. Although federal guidance emphasizes incorporating risk into asset management planning, practices for identifying, prioritizing, and integrating bridge-related risks vary widely among DOTs. These differences reflect variations in geographic hazards, network characteristics, funding constraints, institutional capacity, and data availability, making it difficult to standardize approaches for quantifying and incorporating risk into decision-making.

NCHRP Synthesis 667: Identifying Risks and Incorporating Them into Bridge Asset Management Planning, produced by TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program, documents current DOT practices for identifying, evaluating, and incorporating risk into bridge asset management planning and bridge management plans. The report examines the types of risks considered, the organizational and decision-making structures used to address them, the prioritization approaches employed, and the integration of risk-based priorities into bridge and transportation asset management planning. It also reviews practices for monitoring and recalibrating risk-informed decisions and considers how incorporating risk influences funding and resource allocation.

Transportation agencies have used performance-based management (PBM) for decades to guide strategic decision-making. PBM uses performance data to improve project and program delivery, align decisions with agency priorities, and increase transparency and accountability. Within a PBM framework, strategic objectives are tied to planning, programming, and performance monitoring to ensure investments support agency goals and performance targets. While generalized PBM frameworks apply to maintenance activities, the primary focus of most PBM-based transportation research has been on investing capital funding effectively.

NCHRP Research Report 1188: Performance-Based Management Approaches for Maintenance: A Guide, produced by TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program, is designed to help practitioners implement or strengthen maintenance practices that incorporate PBM strategies. The report, along with its accompanying online tools, provides highway maintenance leaders at agencies of all levels of PBM maturity with the information needed to strengthen existing or establish new performance-based maintenance programs.