Cost Benefits of Weather Information for Winter Road Maintenance

This purpose of this research project is to provide a current benefit-cost assessment for weather information in winter road maintenance. To this end, the research team first summarized the weather information resources used by transportation agency personnel in making winter maintenance decisions and investigated how weather information was used to support winter maintenance operations, through extensive literature reviews and surveys to winter maintenance professionals and the meteorological community. Following this, the research team developed a model for winter maintenance costs. A methodology of artificial neural network and sensitivity analysis was proposed and applied to three case studies to analyze the benefits and costs associated with the use of weather information. The benefit-cost analyses showed that the use of weather information could bring more benefits than costs. Moreover, it was found that winter maintenance costs could be reduced by improving the accuracy of weather information and/or increasing the use of weather information. Finally, this study identified secondary benefits of deploying and using road weather information systems. These research results should help transportation agencies to guide and direct future investment in weather information services and technologies.