November 2015 - April 2016

The fourth test field campaign has taken place

As usual, also this year the official beginning of winter for traffic and transport coincides with the implementation of the obligation to use winter tyres or have snow chains on board. As in other Italian provinces, in the Province of Trento this starts on November 15th. This key date has represented the official beginning of the second and final large-scale trial phase of the CLEAN-ROADS project.

What has been done until now?

  • Decision support system for road operators. During the winter season 2014-2015, a first decision support system was introduced. Thanks to this system, road operators were able to:

    • receive a probabilistic meteorological bulletin, specifically prepared by the meteorologists of the local Weather Service for this use case, presenting the probability of snow and ice events 24 hours in advance;

    • be informed on a real-time basis about the conditions of the monitored road network.

    The system has been now improved thanks to:

    • an automatic mechanism of alarms generation, that immediately informs road operators about the presence of critical road weather events in correspondence of the fixed monitoring station;

    • an improved road forecasting system, which integrates the probabilistic meteorological bulletin with quantitative nowcasts of the road surface temperatures, which are computed through the coupling of heterogeneous forecasting models and techniques.

  • Travelers information services. During the winter season 2014-2015, travelers started to have at disposal, both on the web portal "Viaggiare in Trentino" as well as on http://map.clean-roads.eu, a set of real-time information about the status of the monitored roads. During the last months this latter service has been significantly improved, in particular as far as graphical layout and usability are concerned. The advantage that users now have is in the possibility to enjoy this information through nomadic devices such as smartphone and tablets in a much more comfortable way. The expectation is that travelers can now have an efficient instrument in order to further improve their travel choices and contribute to safer and more efficient traffic conditions in winter. 

What can local travelers do in order to be involved in the project?

The involvement of local travelers during the winter season 2015-2016 is more important than in the past. The engagement can take place through:

  • two questionnaires, one already available online at the following link and one organized during the second part of the winter season. The first questionnaire has the objective to collect comments and feelings of users before the pilot demonstration of the CLEAN-ROADS system, while the second and final questionnaire will try to understand the users' feedbacks after the real-life testing of the new application;

  • a users' notification collection campaign, that will use the Twitter project channel (@CleanRoads) to allow local travelers to send notifications about the winter driveability conditions to the Road Management Service of the Autonomous Province of Trento. 

What is the goal of this final trial phase?

The goal of this final trial phase is to carry out a final evaluation of the technological solution developed in the project in real-life conditions. More specifically, the purpose is to perform a comparison with the reference ex-ante conditions in order to assess the environmental, economical and safety benefits that will be directly observed in the test area. These considerations will be particularly important in order to evaluate the possible future exploitation of the system in this alpine area.