Winter Control

Province of Groningen

Winter Control is a system used for ice control. The system is linked to both measuring points on the road network and gritting vehicles. It collects data on road conditions, gritting actions and any equipment or machine malfunctions. It also provides insight into salt stocks.

Last change on 5th of March 2025, at 13:44 (CET) | Publication Standard 1.0

• Publication category: Other algorithms
• Impact assessment: Field not filled in.
• Status: In use

General information

Theme

Traffic

Begin date

2020-03

Contact information

[e-mail]

Responsible use

Goal and impact

The aim of Winter Control is to make smoothing as efficient as possible, to gain more insight into smoothing operations, and to reduce environmental and natural impact by gritting more efficiently.

Considerations

By using Winter Control, there is greater insight into the entire process surrounding smoothness control. It also results in reduced consumption, improved cost efficiency, less use of materials and more insight into and efficient maintenance of the machines. Although this costs the province more time, especially after gritting operations, Winter Control makes the overall process more (cost-)efficient.

Human intervention

The systems collect raw data and display it to county employees. The system does not perform any operations on the data; everything is displayed in its original form. Employees interpret the data and take follow-up actions or adjust processes accordingly. So there is no automatic decision-making.

Risk management

The many sensors used by the system could get malfunctions, causing the transmitted data to be incorrect. However, there are also sensors that check for such failures.

Legal basis

Roads Act

Operations

Data

The system uses coordinates of the measurement points in the roads, and reference routes. Furthermore, for the drivers of the gritting vehicles, both of which are largely supplied through a third party, data is recorded on tractor licence plates, which drivers drive which route, their names and validity of driving licences.

Technical design

Scattered across the province's acreage are several measuring points which collect data on the road surface at that point, this is the Gladheid Reporting System (GMS). The data from this GMS (the asphalt temperature, ambient temperature, humidity, humidity level of the asphalt, the amount of salt on the asphalt, etc.) are used to gain an insight into the slipperiness of the roads.

Based on these results, gritting actions are launched. During these gritting actions, all gritters are monitored, collecting data on their: speed, route, spreading width, spreading volume, dry or wet spreading, etc.

This data is used not only to optimise the spreading actions, but also to improve the rest of the process. For example, this system gives insight into the salt stock but also into possible defects via the Defect Reporting System (DMS).

The DMS also gives an overview of the maintenance history of the gritters so that predictive maintenance can also be done here or it can be seen when a part or gritter needs to be replaced instead of repaired.

External provider

BG-Engineering B.V.