March 2013

First meeting with road operators

The technological dimension is a fundamental layer of the CLEAN-ROADS project. However, the "social" component plays an equal or greater important role, in order to guarantee that the technical solutions fit well with the empirical needs of travellers and road operators. For this reason, it is important to actively involve these target groups from the early stages of the project.

Road operators have collected over the years a considerable experience in the field of winter maintainance that, if properly taken into account, will give the opportunity to understand the major real problems and needs that can be addressed by the different technologies considered within the project.  

During the lifetime of CLEAN-ROADS, the road operators staff, in particular the one who works within the test area,  will be involved as well in a series of training sessions. In this way, road operators will have not only an increased technical background for improving the efficiency and quality of their job, but also will have the basis in order to properly interact with the information provided by the RWIS and thus put the premises for a practical optimization of the winter maintainance service.

The first "plenary" meeting with the road operators has taken place in March 2013. The meeting has been the occasion to present the CLEAN-ROADS project  and to start giving some technical details about the enviromental phenomena that mostly affect the formation of ice on the roads. Thanks to this meeting, a constructive and active dialogue has kicked-off, and many useful inputs for the definition of the architecture of the entire CLEAN-ROADS system have been gathered.