Accelerated Construction Technology Transfer
This lead state team has completed all planned activities and is no longer active. The information below, as created by the active lead state team, remains available for review by users seeking additional information.
Visit FHWA's ACTT website and view their ACTT Fact Sheet
About
Recent years have witnessed growing interest in accelerated highway construction as an answer to the need to reconstruct major highways while minimizing delay and community disruption. "Accelerated construction," however, is not a traditional product or technology. Rather, it is an approach to highway construction employing many different techniques and technologies. Such a non-traditional product requires a non-traditional implementation plan. In addition to simply building things faster, current concepts of accelerated construction imply planning and design for a highway corridor comprised of several related projects so that planning and design decisions are made in an environment that provides maximum flexibility. Also implied are the use of innovative contracting procedures and extended life for the finished project.
Concepts, ideas and approaches must be defined if plans to implement them into highway engineering practice are to be fulfilled. The definition of accelerated construction for the purposes of implementation planning is: A process to encourage the use of innovative technologies and techniques to accelerate the construction of major highway projects with extended service lives for the purpose of reducing user delay and community disruption.
Such a process will bring to the attention of the highway community many innovations and research results currently available but not generally applied. It will also provide a mechanism for the introduction of future innovative techniques and technologies that may emerge from research, from a future Strategic Highway Research Program or from the FHWA Pavement Technology Program, for example.
Expected outputs from a successful implementation effort will include:
- Formal information exchange processes, both national and local, on the application of new techniques and technologies to specific corridors and projects;
- The identification and communication of new concepts applied to one project that may have general application;
- and National guidelines and associated training materials for the application of the process to drive innovation.
The ultimate outcomes of a successful implementation program will be:
- Noticeably reduced construction times for major highway projects;
- Reduced project life cycle costs;
- and Improved service and safety during and after construction.
