Title of Document: DESIGN OF AVAILABILTY PAYMENT MECHANISM FOR PUBLIC PRIVATE

Availability Payment Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) are long-term contracts where the private sector is allocated responsibilities of designing, building, financing, operating and maintaining the highway on a public project. In return to their services the private sector is reimbursed through a performance-based predetermined payment plan. As per this plan, the private sector is entitled to receive predetermined payments called Maximum Availability Payments (MAPs) throughout the concession term (operations and maintenance phase). Thus the MAP amount and the length of concession term would have a major influence on the overall project cost since any inappropriate increase or decrease to these terms will heavily influence the project outcomes. This mandates the public agencies to diligently design MAPs and concession term but review of practices shows that the public agencies have been relying on unwarranted traditional methods to finalize these terms. Furthermore, very few researchers have worked towards designing the concession term and all the previous works have considered the payments and concession term as independent variables. Last, the timing and cost of post-concession maintenance costs have never been considered before while designing payment structur