The Maintenance Decision Support System (MDSS) project was initiated in 1999 by the U.S. Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Office of Transportation Operations Road Weather Management (RWM) Program. The MDSS capabilities were designed based on feedback received by the FHWA in 2001 from maintenance managers at a number of State Departments of Transportation (DOTs) as part of an initiative to capture surface transportation weather decision support requirements. The MDSS project goal is to seed the implementation of advanced decision support services provided by the private sector forstate DOTs. This has been achieved by developing core software capabilities that serve as a basis for these tailored products. After the 2001 user needs assessment was completed, the MDSS program was extended with the objective of developing and demonstrating a functional prototype MDSS. Field demonstrations of the prototype MDSS were conducted in Iowa between February and April 2003, and during the winter of 2004. Additional field tests were conducted during the winter of 2004-2005 in Colorado. The performance of the prototype MDSS improved during each of the successive field demonstrations. The weather and road condition predictions and treatment recommendations generated by the system were increasingly more accurate as the development effort moved forward. Iowa garage supervisors actively consideredthe treatment guidance and on occasion they successfully used the recommended treatments without modification. This paper describes the status of the MDSS project, results and lessons learned from the Iowa field demonstrations, and future development efforts. For the covering abstract see ITRD E143097.
Abstract