Measurement of road performance and impact on transportation operations with the Opti-Grade system

摘要

Increasing costs have forced the forest industry to rationalize its road maintenance operations. Though the industry needs to control its maintenance costs, it must also avoid any negative impacts on trucking activities, which currently account for close to 50% of the industry's wood-procurement costs. To help the forest industry solve this problem, FERIC developed a modified approach to grading that focuses maintenance on the road segments that need grading most, thereby making the most efficient use of graders, lowering grading costs, and improving the performance of the roads. Today, the system is used on a variety of operations to manage road maintenance, to facilitate research projects aimed at optimizing maintenance operations, to provide a decision-support tool for managing road rehabilitation, and to provide a means of evaluating how the quality of the running surface affects trucking costs. FERIC worked with a company in western Canada (Alpac) to complete the first phase of a study to assess the impact of road roughness on haul costs. The study's main objective was to find the right balance between minimizing road maintenance costs and maximizing the efficiency of the transportation system. The potential benefits for the company were large, since according to Alpac, each reduction of 1 minute in cycle times translated into a saving of more than $75 000 for their fleet. This paper presents a summary of the potential offered by Opti-Grade as well as the results of our ongoing research.