Icy Roads, Meet Your Match

Karen Hao reports on new technological advancements in the fight to improve road safety in icy winter conditions. What better place to experiment and test new ideas than Alaska?

According to HAO, the Alaska Department of Transportation has partnered with Microsoft and Fathym to create new data collection and machine learning technologies to help perform riad maintenance in winter conditions.

The "internet-of-things" company Fathym equipped snow plows and light vehicles in the Alaska DOT fleet with "mobile sensors that track road temperature, precipitation, and pavement conditions." Here's more about how the system works:

During the standard workday, the sensors feed data back at three-second intervals to Fathym’s analytics platform, WeatherCloud, which runs on top of Microsoft’s cloud services. The platform churns out real-time and forecasted road weather conditions that supplements the weather service’s air temperature and overarching forecast and the data from 63 other existing road weather information systems in the area.

All that data allows better deployment of road treatments and maintenance crews.