Road Weather Management Program
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Best Practices for Road Weather Management Version 2.0

Best Practices > Publications > Publication Titles

Title:

Use of Expert Systems for Roadway Weather Maintenance Decisions

Abstract:

Automated systems for forecasting frost and fog on roads and bridges using were deployed at specific locations in Iowa. These systems ingest current observations and forecasted values of specific weather variables and produce forecasts of the indicated roadway condition. Forecasts made on the basis of uncertain (weather) input information will invariably lead to less-than-maximum hit rates and greater-than-zero false-alarm rates. A procedure, based on signal detection theory, has been developed to separately analyze the accuracy and bias of the systems. By using this procedure, the roadway maintenance manager can tune the system to achieve the optimum balance of hit-rate-versus-false-alarm rate for a given application. Comparison of the estimated levels of accuracy of these forecast systems with other reports in the meteorological literature reveals that our systems have skill levels sufficient to have practical value.

Source(s):

Iowa State University and Black and Veatch

https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/weather/Publications/Publications/108.pdf

Date: 1996

Author:

Takle, Thomson

Keywords:


Pavement condition
Forecast/Prediction
Decision support
Visibility

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