Frost Control Systems and u-blox keep municipal roads safe in adverse weather
Adverse weather road conditions need treatment in order to keep US traffic moving, communities open, and thoroughfares safe.
While state highways are served by adequate but expensive to buy and maintain Road Weather Information Systems (RWIS), municipalities existing solutions are cost prohibitive. Accurately understanding weather conditions enables authorities to predict and allocate salt spreading programmes.
Without the data local municipalities are left with no other option other than to blanket cover the road networks. This is both expensive, inaccurate (often meaning that sections of the road network are left untreated when the majority is not at risk) and importantly contributes to high levels of salt getting into waterways, leading to corrosion and toxic chloride levels.
In order to bring the unit and maintenance costs down, and thus make Road Weather Information Systems available for all municipalities, Frost Control Systems needed to completely redefine a solution.
Existing roadside sensing solutions were bulky and relied on satellite, 3G and 4G modems, fibre optic backhaul and some LTE for data transfer which were complex and costly to maintain. As an IoT solution data communication would be critical to success.
Frost Control Systems has deployed its cost effective Road Weather Information System solution across 30 states in the US, ensuring municipalities can deliver salt application to the right place at the right time.
All data goes through u-blox’s Thingstream communication-as-a-service platform.
- The FCS solution is 6-8 times less expensive than other solutions on the market, making it a viable option for all municipalities
- Municipalities can precisely target their salt application, resulting in 25-40% reductions in salt expenditure
- As salt loads approach the natural removal capacity of the environment, long term, chloride(salt) seepage into waterways is reduced or eliminated all together.
- Solution uses u-Blox’s Thingstream communication-as-a-service platform for all data transfer from cloud to storage and most data from road to cloud.
- Global software from u-blox’s Thingstream enables FCS to offer the RWIS solution internationally
Bradley Tener, Founder and CEO, Frost Control Systems, said: “ublox’s Thingstream connectivity platform enables us to transport data from our road-side sensors via an MQTT broker and MQTT bridge to anywhere we want cloud to cloud.”
