Highway agencies are currently facing a critical challenge of an increased demand for highway system rehabilitation and construction work with limited available inspection resources. The shortage of experienced inspection staff because of retirement or migration to the private sector has led to major impacts on construction inspection capabilities. To address this issue, many state departments of transportation (DOTs) have searched for effective strategies to accomplish construction inspection operations with optimized resource allocation. This study aims to examine the current inspection optimization approaches to overcome limited inspection resources such as a lack of inspection funding, shortage of inspection staff, and time constraints. A comprehensive review of quality assurance programs of 50 DOTs was conducted to identify the effective approaches used to reduce inspection resources. The results show that state DOTs use many different approaches to optimize inspection resources such as outsourcing, inspection frequency reduction, or using contractor's test results for acceptance. Especially, some state DOTs recently have employed risk-based inspection to overcome limited inspection resources. This paper discusses briefly how risk-based inspection approaches can be implemented for highway construction projects. The findings of this study contribute to the body-of-knowledge and the construction industry by providing different optimization strategies for construction inspection practices in highways.
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