Smart Road Salting |

In winter time impressive amounts of salt are being applied to roads in municipalities in Middle and Northern European countries to prevent slippery roads. Decisions on road salting are usually taken based on local weather forecasts, experience of municipal staff and data from a few local sensor stations.

The Smart Road Salting Project aims to drastically change current road salting practices. This is done by installing a fine-grained network of low-cost road sensor stations along the municipal road network, each of them connected to the internet, and by developing FIware apps to analyse and enrich the data.

As a result, municipal coordinators receive road salting advice for each specific road section. In a later stage the entire road salting process could be automated by delivering instructions directly to the gritting vehicles.

Application of road salt based on ‘when and where it is needed’ contributes first and foremost to safer roads and thus less accidents in winter time.

In addition, in our expectation, it leads to less public money spent on gritting and to less road salt leaking into the environment.

Team

Henk Smeenk Team Leader

Jaap de Winter