Evaluation of the Asphalt Binder Quality Tester (2022)
Chapter: Glossary of Terms
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Suggested Citation:
"Glossary of Terms." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Evaluation of the Asphalt Binder Quality Tester. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
doi: 10.17226/26603.
Glossary of Terms
| Adoption scenario | Articulates a possible future in which a technology has been adopted. Characteristics of an adoption scenario may include the pace and magnitude of adoption, the characteristics of the user population, and the characteristics of the enabling environment (policy, regulatory, and market characteristics that influence adoption). In this evaluation, adoption scenarios were used to scale user-level net benefits to estimate the national-level net benefits of the Asphalt Binder Quality Tester (ABQT). |
| Net benefits | The difference between the benefits and costs of an intervention (in the case of this study, the intervention is the adoption of an ABQT). |
| Network effects | Occur when the value of a good or service increases as more users adopt it. |
| Social benefits | Increases in the welfare of society that result from an intervention. This could include environmental benefits, public health benefits, or improvements in infrastructure that are available to society. |
| Technical impact metric | Used to quantify an expected benefit of a technology. For example, if a technology is expected to save a user time, the technical impact metric is the hours of employee labor that are saved. |
| User benefits | Benefits, savings, or increases in welfare that accrue to users of a technology, which may include savings of capital costs, labor, energy, and materials. |
| User groups | Defined by specific use cases for a technology. In this evaluation, RTI defined three user groups: asphalt mix plants, binder suppliers, and owner agencies. |
| User subgroups | Groups nested within user groups that help characterize variation within a user group. For example, asphalt mix plant operators may have one facility or multiple facilities, slightly changing the way they adopt and use the ABQT. Variation represented within a subgroup allowed RTI to refine the analysis, but the fundamental use case remained the same within each user group. |
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