Executive Summary
Overview
This is a guide for transportation professionals on why and how to deploy winter Maintenance Decision Support Systems (MDSS). Adverse winter weather can cause traffic delays and crashes. Treating the effects of winter weather can also have impacts on the environment. Addressing the complexities of winter maintenance and operations requires transportation personnel to work with a myriad of issues including: conflicting weather forecasts, hard to obtain road condition reports, and challenging commuting patterns.
An MDSS can help maintenance personnel manage this information and make more informed decisions. An MDSS integrates weather and pavement forecasts specifically targeted to road segments with maintenance rules of practice to provide personnel with optimized road treatment strategies.
This technology was developed under the direction of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) with contract support from a consortium of national research laboratories. A stakeholder group consisting of personnel from transportation agencies, academia, and the private sector assisted with development.
Why Use MDSS?
MDSS can benefit state and local departments of transportation (DOTs) in many ways. Some benefits include:
- Reducing costs for labor, materials, and equipment
- Improving public safety
- Improving mobility
- Realizing a higher level of service on roads
- Maintaining consistency of service across districts or states
- Providing training for both new and experienced DOT personnel
- Enhancing collaboration between DOT maintenance areas, and
- Providing a way to review maintenance actions during past storms
Deploying MDSS
There are four phases for deploying MDSS: Planning and justification; acquisition; implementation; and use and evaluation. Each of the phases has its own tasks to be completed. The specific tasks and resources required will vary depending on the software approach selected.
Lessons Learned
Past implementations of MDSS have revealed the importance of:
- Initial and ongoing training
- Dealing with institutional barriers
- Management commitment
- Learning the system biases and tendencies
- Maintaining a network of environmental sensor stations along routes of interest, and
- Maintaining metadata[1] and current rules of practice of the agency and those available within the MDSS
Getting Help
There are many resources to guide an agency in deploying MDSS. These include: knowledgeable individuals (in government, industry, and academia), MDSS users, training, reports, articles, information on MDSS software offerings, technology transfer, and samples and templates of requests for proposals. Many of these resources are available on-line and are updated on a continuing basis. Links are included in this guide.