State departments of transportation are aggressively pursing new technologies and practices to improve winter highway maintenance. Current research efforts address one or more aspects of the complex task of anticipating and responding to snow and ice events on highways and bridges across local and state jurisdictions. Considerable effort is directed at developing, deploying and evaluating sensing and communication technologies collected under the umbrella of anti-icing and road weather information systems (AI/RWIS). Some evaluation of anti-icing and de-icing materials and snow and ice removal equipment is also being carried out ¿ a much needed effort. For the most part, however, these testing activities are related to the properties and characteristics of the materials and equipment in and of themselves ¿ that is, how they meet specifications or perform on standard lab tests. What is needed, in addition, is related field-testing/follow-up.

Conduct structured field testing and evaluation across a range of winter conditions and different highway maintenance organizational structures to assess the practical effectiveness, ease of use, optimum application rates, barriers to use, durability, and so on, of innovative materials, equipment and methods for improved winter highway maintenance.

This proposal outlines a new transportation pooled fund research project to investigate the applicability of various winter maintenance materials, equipment and methods for use by state and local highway maintenance crews. The pooled fund will be ongoing, with new projects undertaken as previous work is completed. The Wisconsin Department of Transportation will be the lead agency, responsible for administration of the pooled fund and dissemination of results. Project partners who contribute funds to the study will appoint representatives to serve as members of the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC). The committee will be responsible for identifying needed research, selecting investigators, reviewing progress and approving deliverables.

$25,000 per year commitment requested from each state. More projects will be funded as additional commitments are received.