Wintersense: Demonstrating the potential of the IoT in winter road maintenance

在冬季一个寒冷的夜晚，预报有霜冻，英国高速公路当局可能会在3500条盐渍路线上散布多达3.5万吨岩盐，以保持国家主要道路的畅通和安全。如此数量的除冰剂的扩散不仅是一种财政负担，因为使用盐的成本及其对混凝土结构的破坏，而且还可能对环境造成极大的破坏，在其他淡水水道中增加盐。尽管存在环境问题，但人们认为在减少道路事故和道路使用者延误方面节省的成本更重要。冬季维护工程师通过咨询道路天气信息系统(RWIS)来制定夜间决策，该系统将天气预报数据与道路温度和状况数据相结合。边缘夜晚(预计路面温度将接近冰点)是最有问题的。在这种情况下，公路工程师面临着一个艰难的决定，即是否在网络上加盐。如果撒了盐，但没有霜冻，那么就发生了不必要的财政支出。然而，如果盐不扩散，出现霜冻，道路就会变得不安全，地方当局可能会受到法律诉讼。甚至在目前的经济形势之前，英国地方当局就面临着相当大的压力，必须证明他们的冬季维护预算取得了最佳效益。不幸的是，反复的预算削减(从某种程度上讲，2010年前的一系列暖冬是合理的)可能会导致冬季维护制度自满和缺乏准备。在过去的几个严冬里，这产生了重大的、非常明显的影响。因此，在新的金融制度下实现最佳价值是一个重大挑战。正是在这里，冬季道路维护需要抓住物联网提供的新机遇，以更明智地做出决策。最新一代RWIS基于基于路线的预测，考虑到当地地理与区域气候的相互作用，为每50米路段生成详细的路面温度模型。通过每晚了解哪些路段可能低于0摄氏度的门槛，公路工程师可以有选择地只处理受影响的路线，从而显著节省盐的使用量。然而，这目前还没有发生。在诉讼日益增多的环境中，从业者对根据模型输出而不是事实做出决定感到紧张。这现在意味着，迫切需要以前所未有的规模核实基于路线的道路天气预报。这项提议旨在通过生产和部署嵌入物联网生态系统中的新一代低成本、支持互联网的传感器来解决这一问题。然而，这种方法不仅将提供一种监测和验证解决方案，而且还有可能成为冬季道路维护的新的“即时预测”(即未来3小时的预测)解决方案的基础。因此，该项目将在伯明翰现有的无线网络上开发和部署多个红外路面温度传感器，这些传感器将连接到一个专用的数据中心，该数据中心将管理实时馈送并实时更新道路天气预报，以促进公路工程师的主动决策。

On a cold night in winter with a frost forecast, UK highway authorities potentially spread up to 35,000 tonnes of rock salt over 3,500 salting routes in order to keep the nation's key roads open and safe. The spreading of de-icing agents in such quantities is not only a financial burden in terms of the costs of applying the salt and the damage it causes to concrete structures, but it can also be very damaging to the environment, adding salt to otherwise freshwater water courses. Despite the environmental issues, the perceived savings in reduced road accidents and road user delays are considered to be more important. Winter maintenance engineers base their nightly decision making by consulting a Road Weather Information System (RWIS) which combines weather forecast data with road temperature and condition data. Marginal nights (where the road surface temperatures are forecast to be close to freezing) are the most problematic. In this situation, highway engineers face a difficult decision of whether or not to salt the network. If salt is spread, but no frost occurs, then unnecessary financial expenditure has occurred. However, if salt is not spread and a frost occurs, the roads become unsecured and a local authority could be subject to legal action. Even before the current economic climate, local authorities in the UK were under considerable pressure to demonstrate that they were achieving 'best value' from their winter maintenance budgets. Unfortunately, repeated budget cuts (to some extent justified by a run of mild winters before 2010) can lead to complacency and a lack of preparedness in winter maintenance regimes. This has had significant, highly noticeable, implications over the last few severe winters. As such, there is a significant challenge in achieving best value under the new financial regime. It is here where winter road maintenance needs to embrace the new opportunities afforded by the Internet of Things to make decision making smarter.The latest generation of RWIS is based on route based forecasts which take into account how the local geography interacts with the regional climate to produce a detailed model of road surface temperatures for every 50m section of road. By knowing which sections of road are likely to fall below the 0C threshold on a night-by-night basis, highway engineers can selectively treat just the affected routes and thus make significant savings in salt usage. However, this is presently not happening. In an environment of increasing litigation, practitioners are nervous about making decisions based on model output as opposed to ground truth. This now means that the verification of route based road weather forecasts is urgently needed at an unprecedented scale. This proposal seeks to solve this problem by producing and deploying a new generation of low cost, internet enabled, sensors embedded within an Internet of Things ecosystem. However, this approach will not only provide a monitoring and verification solution, but also has the potential to form the basis of a new 'nowcasting' (i.e. forecast for the next 3 hours) solution for winter road maintenance. Hence, this project will develop and deploy a number of infrared road surface temperature sensors across an existing wireless network in Birmingham These sensors will be linked to a dedicated data hub which will manage the live feeds and update road weather forecasts in real-time to facilitate pro-active decision making by highway engineers.