Project 1.3

Develop Automated Road Condition Reporting System

NOTE: This project was tabled at the July 29, 2003 Steering Committee meeting, due to the separate and ongoing Maintenance Decision and Support System (MDSS) project. This project will be revisited during Phase II Project discussions to assess our role.

Project Champion - Mark Nelson, Minnesota DOT

To purpose of this project is to develop, test, and evaluate automated road condition reporting that will reduce the need to manually enter situations in statewide reporting systems.

Currently, road condition information for North Dakota is manually entered into #SAFE and Minnesota road condition data is manually entered into Condition Acquisition Reporting System (CARS). Unfortunately the time when the data is needed most by 511 travelers and users is the time when staff members are busiest with management operations. A separate project through FHWA is addressing some of these needs as part of MDSS.

This project will focus on working with, and supporting, the MDSS project in developing an approach to automated road condition reporting and in leveraging the results into an improved traveler information system. Vendors would develop parameters for generating applicable good/fair/difficult road condition situations based on the weather forecasts, in an automated fashion based. This will allow for testing the reliability, accuracy and timeliness of automated road condition reporting. The automated reports would also allow for override of reports manually entered by staff in each state.

This project will provide an operational test of automatically generated road condition reports. Automating the reports will save staff time at their busiest operational time, improve accuracy, and reduce delays on making the information available to travelers.