The many challenges facing the WSDOT Highway Maintenance program are continually increasing, stretching WSDOT’s ability to keep highway infrastructure in a good state of repair. Since the mid-1990s, WSDOT Maintenance has been evaluating the effectiveness of its Maintenance Program through outcome-based performance measures, referred to as level of service (LOS). The Maintenance Accountability Process (MAP), as it has become known, is a comprehensive planning, measuring, and managing process that provides a means for communicating the impacts of policy and budget decisions on program service delivery to key customers, including WSDOT executive leadership, the legislature, and the public. The objective of this project is to give WSDOT Maintenance the ability to forecast LOS performance by creating an algorithm to predict trends based on different performance measures across different maintenance activities. Based on a data-driven approach, this algorithm will utilize performance measures to forecast LOS at different investment levels.

Principal Investigator: Kishor Shrestha, Construction Engineering, WSU
Sponsor: WSDOT
WSDOT Technical Monitor: Kelly Shields
WSDOT Project Manager: Doug Brodin
Scheduled Completion: June 2023

Transportation departments commonly use chemicals on roadways before, during, and after storms to improve road conditions. These chemicals help prevent icing, prevent snowpack from bonding to the pavement, break up compacted snowpack, ease snow removal, and more. While sodium chloride is most commonly used by transportation agencies in solid and liquid (brine) form, many additives, alternatives, and performance-enhancing products and blends are available. Traditional laboratory tests of these materials sacrifice some or all realism by providing controlled, consistent testing conditions. Sophisticated laboratory tests may quantify material performance in terms of friction, persistence or residual performance, snow coverage, reduction in the snow-pavement bond, or some other, more realistic performance measure.  However, the complexity, expense, and questionable repeatability of such methods are significant.  To address this issue, this project will devise a standardized laboratory test that will allow agencies to realistically and robustly assess and compare the performance of de-icers. That information will allow budget-pressed transportation departments to make data-driven procurement decisions. 

Principal Investigator: Xianming Shi, Civil and Environmental Engineering, WSU

Sponsors:
Minnesota Department of Transportation
Clear Roads Pooled Fund

Scheduled completion: September 2023