Economic Comparison of Emperical Winter Road Maintenance and Using ITS Weather Functionalities

One of the tasks of the Road Maintenance and Transportation Organization (RMTO) is maintaining the roads in different climates in order to create trafficable conditions which cost huge amounts of money annually. Using ITS services can help in saving the budget through in time sending the machinery and equipments.
This article investigates the use of intelligent systems in decrease of the road maintenance costs through economical comparison of empirical winter maintenance and using ITS weather functionalities. For this purpose, one of the accident-prone and snowy roads of Kerman province was selected (Mahan-Bam Road). After calculation of costs and comparison of the empirical method and using ITS functions, it is determined that well-timed access to the meteorological data can decrease road maintenance costs significantly. The amount of decrease according to the existing data (48 days data announced by RMTO) is about 102*108 Rials which is a huge amount of money.