By Shine Salur, Industry Development Director – Transport, Brightly, a Siemens company
In the heart of every city, roads, bridges, and tunnels quietly serve millions of people each day. But behind this seamless movement lies a persistent challenge: how to keep assets in good condition without escalating costs, increasing carbon emissions, or causing avoidable disruptions.
For decades, transport agencies have taken a simplistic approach to asset management, often only reacting to issues as they arise and replacing ageing infrastructure with new. This firefighting mentality can be costly, inefficient, and ultimately unsustainable, often prioritising short-term political gains over long-term public value.
But a revolution is underway. Around the world, transport agencies and contractors are embracing AI, data-driven tools, and sensor technologies to extend asset life and improve efficiency. By shifting away from reactive maintenance towards predictive asset management, and optimising existing infrastructure through better informed decision making, organisations are achieving improved financial and environmental outcomes.
A Smarter Approach: Maintaining Instead of Replacing
A major misconception in infrastructure management is that ageing assets must be replaced. Through access to better information and data driven insights, maintenance regimes can be tailored to allow roads and bridges to operate for decades longer in some instances.
Whole-life cost analysis shows that timely, planned actions – like resurfacing a road, strengthening a bridge, or recalibrating tunnel ventilation operations – can significantly extend asset life. These strategies also reduce the environmental footprint of construction by cutting material waste, lowering emissions, and prioritising resilience over expansion.
Get the Basics Right Before Diving into AI
While AI holds enormous promise for transforming asset management, many transport organisations still struggle with the fundamentals: capturing reliable data, maintaining accurate asset registers, and enabling meaningful data flow between systems.
Without consistent, reliable, and meaningful data, even the most sophisticated AI solutions fall short. So, the most pressing challenge today isn’t adopting AI, it’s building the data foundations that make AI viable and valuable.
Highways may eventually benefit from real-time sensors and innovative materials (such as smart pavement materials) that can self-repair minor cracks or damage, reducing maintenance needs and extending asset life. But for now, agencies must focus on capturing accurate data, integrating systems, and making decisions grounded in reality rather than theory.
A Pragmatic, Tiered Approach to Asset Management
What’s needed is a structured and balanced approach, one that links long-term strategic planning with tactical decision-making and operational delivery. This three-tier model ensures that interventions are not only cost-effective, but aligned with broader objectives and grounded in accurate data.
The real value lies not just in adopting new technologies, but in ensuring that planners, engineers, and asset managers collaborate to extract actionable insights from the information they have.
Manage Better, Not Just Build More
The future of transport infrastructure isn’t about building more – it’s about managing smarter. It’s time to move away from crisis-driven decisions and toward a data-informed, sustainability-focused approach that delivers long-term value over short-term wins.
For more information, visit brightlysoftware.com/transport
