Development of a Toolkit for Cost-Benefit Analysis of Specific Winter Maintenance Practices, Equipment and Operations

The operators and maintainers of highway networks are facing increasing demands and customer expectations regarding mobility and transportation safety during inclement weather, while confronting budget and staffing constraints and environmental challenges related to chemical and material usage. It is desirable to use the most recent advances and best practices to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of winter operations, optimize material usage, and reduce annual spending, corrosion and environmental impacts. Determining the benefits and costs of various winter maintenance practices, equipment and operations is a difficult and time consuming proposal for winter maintenance managers. This project developed a toolkit which would facilitate such a benefit-cost analysis to address this need. The toolkit items included anti-icing, deicing, carbide blades, front plows, underbody plows, zero velocity spreaders, Maintenance Decision Support Systems, Automatic Vehicle Location and Geographic Positioning Systems, Road Weather Information Systems, and mobile pavement or air/pavement temperature sensors. The developed toolkit is a website which receives parameter inputs from a user and generates a benefit-cost ratio for the item of interest.

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