TITLE:
Calibration and Confidence in Snowplow Fleet Operations and Fleet Telematics
AUTHORS:
Justin Anthony Mahlberg, Jairaj Desai, Howell Li, Rahul Suryakant Sakhare, Timothy Wells, Darcy Michael Bullock
KEYWORDS:
Telematics, Winter Operations, Snowplows, Weather, Calibration
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Transportation Technologies,
Vol.12 No.4,
September
15,
2022
ABSTRACT: The Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) spends approximately $30
to $60 million a year on deicing salt and operates a fleet of 1,000 winter
operations trucks distributed among 140 locations. The entire fleet is now
instrumented with location telematics, and all new trucks have integrated dash
cameras, salt spreader application rate and plow up/plow down integrated into
the telematics link. When winter storms occur, they have varying regional impacts and INDOT monitors several data sources including
National Weather Service (NWS) live doppler, National Severe
Storms Laboratory’s (NSSL) Multi-Radar Multi-Sensor (MRMS) products, road weather
monitoring stations, and connected vehicles (CV) that provide roadway segment
operating speeds. This paper discusses how telematics has been
integrated to provide a comprehensive view of conditions, truck asset
locations, and material distribution maps. The telematics identified widely
varying salt spreader rates for the same calibration settings and equipment in
preliminary analysis. A calibration box is developed to allow offload
calibration to occur within 10 minutes without weighing or transporting the
fleet vehicle. The method is deployed across six districts at INDOT for over
1000 snowplows. A sampling of eight trucks in the fleet found the proposed
calibration method reduced salt application
on average of 45%. This paper describes a series of telematics dashboards for managing winter operations and details the methods developed for
140 geographically distributed truck units to conduct simple, fast, and
effective calibration.