Calibration and Confidence in Snowplow Fleet Operations and Fleet Telematics

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.