PERFORMANCE METRICS AND TOOLS FOR WINTER MAINTENANCE OPERATIONS

摘要

The continued maturation of Maintenance Decision Support System (MDSS) technologies within the United States have enabled new approaches for near real-time evaluation of both the effectiveness and efficiency of winter maintenance operations. In general, MDSS utilize sophisticated road condition modeling techniques to integrate location-specific weather and road condition observations and forecasts, together with winter maintenance policies, practices and reported activities, to both track and predict how roads will respond to ongoing and pending / prescribed weather and maintenance activities. However, research being carried out in a fifteen-state Transportation Pooled Fund study has recently demonstrated that the underlying data tracking and simulation systems also hold substantial potential for supporting high-level evaluation of winter maintenance operations.rnIn one approach, weather data for each winter maintenance route are captured in real-time, archived, and then digested into various weather metrics that constitute the building blocks of the various winter severity indices already utilized by these agencies.rnIn another approach, this infrastructure is used to create detailed simulations of the road conditions resulting from the experienced weather conditions, and the maintenance activities that would have been required to treat those conditions. These simulations are highly customizable to localized environments, traffic, and maintenance policies and practices, thereby accounting for the unique situations that result in each location. This approach yields independent assessments of the justified maintenance resource utilization that can be compared against actual data. Thus, unlike approaches strictly based on weather, these approaches can account for variability in maintenance resource utilization owing to other localized factors.rnFor the purposes of evaluation, both approaches are being presented to managers in the respective agencies in a single graphical user interface. This interface provides various representations of the data relative to the agencies’ road networks. An associated calculator tool permits the construction of multivariate equations based on these metrics, thereby permitting management personnel to e.g. track the severity of weather conditions using easily customizable weather severity indices supported by highly detailed weather information, or to assign costs to various aspects of the simulated winter maintenance activities so as to permit comparison against actual winter maintenance costs.rnOver the course of the research, much has been learned on the strengths and weaknesses of these and related approaches to creating metrics against which maintenance operations can be evaluated. These findings, as well as examples of real-world utilization of these applications, will be presented.