Estimation of Maintenance Fleet Size for Spreading Operations Considering Road Geometry, Weather, and Traffic

Plowing and salt spreading are the most common countermeasures for snowy and icy pavement surfaces. To help highway maintenance authorities with better planning and allocation of winter highway maintenance resources, this research introduces an analytical model to estimate the required number of spreading trucks to complete the spreading operation within the service time by considering road geometry, weather and traffic. The complexity of the spreading problem lies in dealing with the non-uniform road geometry of each road section, different spreading patterns depending on the road geometry, dynamic traffic speeds under different weather and traffic conditions and the situation with heterogeneous spreading truck capacity for the spreading operations. In this study, a spreading model is developed and applied to a maintenance yard with three road sections in New Jersey. It was found that the developed model is fairly flexible to implement and easy to capture the diverse operational conditions, such as geographical location, climatic and weather conditions, equipment and etc.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHD65 Winter Maintenance.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Chien, Steven I-Jy
  • Gao, Shengyan
  • Meegoda, Jay N
  • Marharba, Taha F
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 92nd Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2013-1-13 to 2013-1-17
• Date: 2013

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 15p
• Monograph Title: TRB 92nd Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Fleet management; Maintenance equipment; Spreaders; Winter maintenance
• Geographic Terms: New Jersey
• Subject Areas: Highways; Maintenance and Preservation; Vehicles and Equipment; I62: Winter Maintenance;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01476404
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 13-3119
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Mar 21 2013 9:14AM