Advanced Decision Support for Winter Road Maintenance: FHWA Documentation of Requirements for Intelligent Transportation Systems

FHWA created the Road Weather Management Program within the Office of Transportation Operations to develop weather information systems, improve winter maintenance technologies, and improve road weather management practices for all weather threats. The program identified winter road maintenance decision support as a priority. In 1999, the program sponsored the Surface Transportation Weather Decision Support Requirements project to study surface transportation decision making, with a focus on winter road maintenance, and to create an operational concept description (OCD) for an advanced decision-support system to improve the current Road Weather Information System. Described are the findings on winter road maintenance decision making that went into the OCD and the plans for further development of an advanced decision-support application within the Intelligent Transportation System.