In 1996, PIARC launched a project linked to Highway Performance Monitoring Systems (HPMS). The objective of this project was to assess existing HPMS-systems to provide road administrations (especially from Central and eastern Europe) with efficient short-term and long-term maintenance strategies and appropriate means to report to the Ministry of Finance and Parliament.

At first stage, this project defined performance criteria for evaluation and acquire necessary information of the existing systems; evaluated the systems from Finland, France, Sweden, United Kingdom, and World Bank's HDM-4 towards the set performance criteria. Then, a workshop to the preliminary results of the evaluation and to exchange knowledge and experiences among the participants was arranged and lastly, this final report of the findings of the study was written.

This report describes the genesis of the project and describes an ideal HPMS system.