Besides the data provided by the usual forecasters, those in charge of road maintenance centres need specific tools at their disposal which give suitable information about the behaviour of the road system, given the speedand critical nature of the onset of hazards such as black ice and their effects on road safety. Regularly collected data on the roads will make it possible to devise measures specific to the type of road surface. Changes in techniques and more specifically the boom in transmissions of data via the internet offer great flexibility. This is the tool which makes the information available to decision makers in real time but also provides forecasts on the conditions that are likely to arise. Up to now, a central server receives surface and atmospheric data from various sensors every 6 minutes. After the figures received have been analysed and validated, they aretransmitted via the telecommunications network to computers spread among the maintenance centres of the Walloon Region in which mapping and data acquisition software have been installed. The data of certain stations whichare better equipped with mainly atmospheric sensors are transmitted to a partner assigned to provide forecasts of the temperature on the road surface and precipitation. The files containing these data are received by the central server which, after processing the data, broadcasts them in an appropriate format to remote computers. These data can then be consulted by the officer in charge of winter road maintenance. In order to broadcast theinformation more widely right up to the home of the officer responsible or on every computer in the departments concerned, a tool based on internettechnology has been adopted and studied. It is an analysis of this tool which is presented here. For the covering abstract see ITRD E143097.
Abstract