Road Weather Management Program
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Office of Operations 21st century operations using 21st century technologies

Best Practices for Road Weather Management Version 2.0

Title:

Management Decision Tools for Winter Operations

Abstract:

New winter maintenance vehicles are being equipped with differential global positioning system (DGPS) receivers and numerous sensors that collect environmental data (e.g., pavement and air temperature), equipment status (e.g., plow up/plow down), and material usage (e.g., salt spreading rate). These data are both telemetered to a dispatch center and recorded on magnetic media for later downloading. With the availability of such data, agencies are exploring the possibilities for improving the performance of winter maintenance operations. Performance measures can be computed from data collected by DGPS receivers and sensors on winter maintenance vehicles using geographic information systems for spatial analysis. A performance measurement approach ensures that the applications of these data support the real needs of decision makers for evaluating and improving winter maintenance operations. The measures can be directly tied to the business processes and performance of operations. This paper presents performance measures for management of winter operations and a series of management decision tools that can be derived from the performance measures.

Source(s):

Maintenance Management 2003: Presentations from the 10th AASHTO?TRB Maintenance Management Conference, Transportation Research Board, Transportation Research Circular No. E-C052. For an electronic copy of this resource, please direct your request to WeatherFeedback@dot.gov.

Date: 2003

Author:

Adams, Maloney, Vonderohe, Martinelli

Keywords:


Winter maintenance

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