Good day and welcome to the Talking Operations Web Conference Road Operations Management. I will be giving a brief introduction to the web-conferencing environment about before turning over the call. Please be advised that today's seminar is being recorded. I'd like to now go over a few details. Today's seminar will last approximately 90 minutes, with 60 minutes allocated for the presenters and 30 minutes for the chat in the small text box underneath the chat area on the lower right side of your screen. Indicate who your question is detected towards unless your question is intended for all presenters. Please make sure you're typing into the thin, text box. Please make sure you send your questions to all participants rather than just the host. Presenters will be unable to ask your questions during the presentation but we will use some of your questions typed in during the last 30 minutes. You can click on the zoom icon at the bottom left of your screen. It looks like a magnifying glass with a plus sign in it. Finally, I would like to remind you that this is being recorded. A file will be posted to the national transportation operations coalition's website within the next week. I will type that address into the chat box shortly. Due to the size of the file, recorded files are available for viewing listening purposes only and cannot be saved to your own computer. The Power Point presentation used during the recording will also very available during the next week. Attendees will be notified of the Power Point and closed captioning of this seminar. At this time I would like to introduce Paul. He is the team leader for the road management team in the Federal Highway Administration Office of Transportation Office Operations. He has worked in several offices serving as team leader before moving to the Office of Operations. In his current position he -- all aspects of the highway system including winter maintain, traffic management and traveller creation. Paul's education is in civil engineering, he's holding a bachelor's degree. I will turn over to Paul. Hello everybody, and thank you for the introduction. Actually, the road management in general has really evolved quite a bit over the past five years, starting even before that, the sharp activities in road weather information but as ITS came on board and advances in weather forecasting were happening in the local community, it gave us the opportunity to grow all types of -- we've had a lot of success in the weather maintain area showing you can do something about the weather not just wait until something happens. We continue to associate that to all types of road operations. So with that, we have pulled together three speakers today who are going to be talking about three activities taking place in the area of road weather management. Each of them will speak today. I think they're going to give you as good background on a number of different activities taking place within the program. So with that, I would like to turn it over to our first speaker, Dan Roosevelt. First, let me give Dan's background. He's a research scientist with the Department of Transportation. He spent on 30 years as a field management responsibility for road maintainance and construction administration. Since 1994, he has served as a research scientist where his research focus has been on maintain operations. Since 1996, Dan has represented VDOT in the area of road weather information systems. Dan is a 1962, graduate of the University of Delaware. The current initiative is a type of an initiative that was formed two years ago within DOT. But it's history goes back farther than that. The idea of sharing data, particularly road weather observations, were happening before the initiative got going. It was within the Aurora Fund Group. I would give credit to taking shape at first. It is from that that the DOT Federal Highway and the Program Office have built the initiative. So I really appreciate having Dan, provide a perspective about the initiative that we think is critical, which is the state DOTs who are the investors in the systems and providers of the data and ultimate users of the better road weather products that will come out. I'd like to turn it over to Dan. Okay, well thanks, Paul. I appreciate the opportunity to be here today to speak to you about CLARUS, the CLARUS Initiative, and road weather information systems. Before we go further I want to be sure you are familiar with the two terms: the road weather and located in the field. A communication system to data transfer and central systems to collect the field data from the numerous ESS. The sensors at the ESS measure atmosphere I can, pavement and water level conditions. After that, the system collects the data, communicates it to a central location where it can be displayed on a computer screen and stores the information for further use. CLARUS is used in a number of other different definitions so we have to be careful in our terminology. The CLARUS system is the tool for collecting and sharing surface weather conditions; the CLARUS program is the operation and maintain functions and personnel needed to sustain the CLARUS system. And the CLARUS Initiative is a U.S. DOT funded development of tools, models and system of support. It involves processes spanning data gathering to road weather information products and services and well research activities that support the creation of these products and services. CLARUS Initiative includes the CLARUS system and program but involves more. The CLARUS Initiative intends to develop and demonstrate an integrated service transportation weather observing, forecasting and data management system. To do this, the CLARUS management team plans to use the talent and resources of many groups that include not only the U.S. DOT but FHWA, state DOTs, like the one I represent, NOAA and the Private Secretary. This is more succinctly described in public statements by the CLARUS management team that characterizes CLARUS as more of a national repository of road weather data from where the weather information can be generated. The development of the information products and services will be generated by others. While I work for the Virginia Department of Transportation, I'm here representing the Aurora Program. It is a system focusing on violation. Advance technologies for detail road weather monitoring and forecasting. Or in other words, Aurora is everything; we focus on road weather information systems from the sensors on the road side and in vehicles to the communications that connect them and the products that use the data these sensors produce. We are 16 members strong and include three agencies from the international community who are noted here in red. This gives us conviction to what's happening in both Europe and Canada. We have over two dozen active projects in areas such as equipment evaluation. We've tested a number of surface temperature sensors for example, standards in architecture where we've promoted a standardized reporting format for road weather conditions and decision support. We've contributed financially to the eight-state pool to maintain decision system being performed by Meridian which will be presented later in this broadcast by Dave Huff. We focus on information outreach and road condition monitoring. If you want more information you can visit your website, which is shown at the bottom of the slide. Most road agencies have long recognized the adverse affects of weather on the operation and safety of our road systems. We've all seen the figures of the. Each year, over a million and a half accidents, over 700,000 injuries and over 7,000 deaths occur during adverse weather. And adverse weather has an influence on the nation's productivity. Most agencies recognize that we can improve their effects of the adverse weather. Those in Aurora are giving -- this map shows the number of environmental station systems or ISS stations deployed in the United States through the year 2002. While some agencies collect data from other sources such as weather sensors installed on trucks and buses, the 1700 plus figure shown is the number of basic road weather data collection points in the United States. Aurora was the resources and the will to influence much of the development and improvement. However two issues beyond our control have long been a concern to us, they are easy access to and sharing of all data introduced produced by environmental stations and the accuracy of that data. The problem with access arises because the data is owned and controlled by each of the 50 agencies that collect it in the United States. Hopefully the benefits of sharing data are obvious to all of you on this webcast. However, sharing of that data between agencies involves a myriad of processes and systems and is a task beyond Aurora's powers to implement. Anyone involved with data knows that sensors get out of tolerance or out of whack. Determining of when this occurred is difficult and often the perspective one wants. We were pleased then when the FHWA heard our concerns and funded the CLARUS Initiative. A as I've indicated the CLARUS Initiative has a number of goals, but it's first and major product will be the CLARUS system. This diagram which I copied from the CLARUS concept of operations document shows the basic steps and outputs of the system. The white box in the middle is the CLARUS system which contains the tools for gathering, checking and checking the operations. The items to the left of the box represents data collection system which is a state DOT system. The items to the right of the box represent data users. These could be state DOT, traffic centers, mass transit managers, rail companies, basically any agency or business that falls into the role of surface transportation weather information service provider and has a need for raw road weather information. CLARUS envisions that agencies will collect their road weather data as they do now gathering it at a central point or points. They will then transmit the data to CLARUS like C-3PO in the old "Star Wars" movies, CLARUS will be able to convert the data and convert it to a single format. This helped overcome one of the road blocks that we were concerned about, easy access to the data. Agencies won't have to do more than make their data available. Data will also very available to other services, NOAA among them to be used for quality checks of the data. It will check the data, flag any data with problems or concerns found and store the data. CLARUS will also notify the data supplier of the findings and concerns it has with the data. CLARUS will not change or delete any data, only add quality flags to it which will follow the data wherever it goes from there. End users, which can be anyone with a legitimate use for the data will be able to pull data from the CLARUS file or can have it sent to them on a scheduled basis. End users will be able to access the data as they would have if they'd dealt directly with the original data supplier. There are many benefits to having a system such as CLARUS. CLARUS will act as an agent for all data suppliers. It will process all the questions from end users. CLARUS will assure that the data is secure and not subject to tampering. In effect, it will smooth out the process for gaining access to the data and helping assure that everyone is aware of the quality of the data. There are a number of advantages to the public sector, CLARUS will offset some of the deployment costs of new sensor stations by integrating observations from other surface observations sources. CLARUS will allow agencies to utilize quality control for better forecasting. CLARUS will give direct quality checking feedback to the DOTs that maintain the ESS. CLARUS will give easy access to the data from neighbors states. CLARUS will be of value to the private sector or the value added; CLARUS will supply steady reliable access to checked data and provide a new quality data forecast stream for. New models are sensitive to the quality of the data. CLARUS will likely be a portal to access weather data as that program comes on line. The Federal Government's fond of telling us of the unlimited possibilities of many programs, but in this case they may be correct. This slide shows a number of services that road weather information systems are already supporting, things like route specific radio and TV broadcasts of travel conditions, such as they're doing in the upper mid west, enhanced decision making tools like MDSS which we're going to hear about later. Like the BASF advertisements that we see on TV. They say we don't make the products you buy, we make them better. CLARUS won't make any of these it was services but it will make them better. I'd like to close by saying a few words about Aurora's -- my mouth's getting dry here. I'd like to say a few words about Aurora's participation in CLARUS. This slide shows the tasks and time line for development of the CLARUS system. The red line is where we are now. The development of the CLARUS system has a strong stakeholder input process. Aurora has taken advantage of this by sending multiple members to the stakeholder meetings and participated in all the task force groups that have dealt with specific issues. The system is under design. And soon the consultant will be undertaking proof of con at the present time testing. Three members, Alaska, Minnesota and Ottawa, will give the consultant access to the road weather data and participate in the findings of the exercise. Essentially, this will lead to a multistate demonstration project with where the end to end working model of the system will be put in place. Aurora intends to have members among the agencies that are chosen for this demonstration. In other words it plans to follow closely the development of the CLARUS system, lending support where it's needed, lending assistance where we can and the design where experience tells us we should. My purpose today was to give you a stakeholders' perspective of CLARUS. My goal was to give you the benefits that it will bring to the data. I may be speaking to the choir on this subject. But if not, hopefully I hope I've influenced you to seek more information. My further hope is that it will result in the active participation in the development of CLARUS through the initiative coordinating committee. All of that is necessary if this initiative is to be successful. A recent Dilbert cartoon strip dealt with a PowerPoint slide program similar to the one you've just witnessed. In the first two frames, Dilbert is seen working on a slide program and he's not too confident it will have the effect or effect any change. In the last frame Dogbert answers asking how much productivity did you have today and Dilbert answers eight slides. If my goal that I spoke about above has not been accomplished then like Dilbert my imaginary production has been just eight slides. Hopefully, you've gotten the idea that I feel CLARUS is a great idea and a needed system, program and initiative, but I'm not its representative. If you want more information information on CLARUS, the program is managed by two very capable gentlemen whose names appear on this side. I suggest you contact them or the CLARUS website which is also known. Finally, let me place one last plug for Aurora. Please visit our website which is shown at the bottom of the slide. Thank you for your time and attention. Great, that's excellent, Dan, thank you very much for that presentation. I see a lot of questions and discussion coming up. Again, we'll take all of those at the end of the three presentations. A couple of points to add to Dan's presentation. As as he mentioned the CLARUS Initiative.org website has lots worth going through; I encourage you to check out that website and just to clarify that the initiative itself will go through the design, development and demonstration of CLARUS, but because the Federal Highway System U.S. DOT is not an operating agency. We will not be the operators of CLARUS. We are looking to see how best to approach that and have been talking about NOAA National Weather Service folks to the extent it would make the function that CLARUS consists of would be operated by national service NOAA, but that is to be determined. I just again want to thank Dan. Your comment that the Federal Government often makes promises, and in this case they may be correct, was very encouraging. I couldn't ask for stronger encouragement from you, thanks, Dan. With that, let me turn over to the next presentation. This is Dave Huft. He is the systems coordinator for the South Dakota transportation system. He currently manages -- which includes seven states in addition to South Dakota. Dave is active in numerous agencies, the Astro Technology Implementation Group and the Transportation Resource Board. With that, I'll turn it over to Dave. Thank you, Paul. It's a pleasure to talk to you about the maintainance systems. The premises behind it is something like this... If you know the current road conditions and if you know what the near medium term forecasts are and if you understand chemistry and physics the road as farces and materials and if you know the materials available for maintain then the MDSS will tell you what the best strategies for winter maintain and will advise you as to what sort of road conditions that you can expect to achieve if you apply those strategies. There are seven other states involved in the MDSS with us. And they're shown on the map here. In edition to the particular states that are involved, Aurora Funding also contributed to the funding. The Meridian Environmental Technology in Grand Forks, North Dakota has been our contractor on this from the state. We're about three years into this project. The original five states were Indiana, Iowa, North Dakota and South Dakota and Kansas, Colorado, and Canada have joined us since that time. We all face a lot of winter maintain challenges. We have rising expectations of the public and not just personal drivers but also commercial carriers with very demanding delivery schedules. We all face constrained funding. Sometimes reliable specific reports of conditions are hard to get. Another problem is that some conditions, particularly fog and ice, frost are difficult to forecast. We're all probably using invasive innovative maintain treatment that we don't have experience with. So there's some uncertainty of what those behaviors are with those materials. The problem is we're losing a lot of our experienced maintain staff, people who have seen a lot of weather and treated a lot of roads in many cases we are replacing them with people who have no prior experience. One other bullet I could have put here is that all of us are facing environmental challenges to the amount of material that we're putting out. Anything that would optimize the material use could be beneficial to us as well. The objectives of our study were first of all to assess the needs to MDSS and our DOTs. There are a lot of technical issues and institutional issues and cultural issues involved in maintain decision support. We're finding among the states that are involved in the study that we have somewhat different maintain philosophies and somewhat different management philosophies. An MDSS has to accommodate that variety. We're looking to define. There I would emphasize the words. We don't want MDSS to go away. We want it to be something that is well established in our various departments. Specific objective of our study was to evaluate the functional prototype that was generated from the Federal Highway Administration's work with the National Laboratories.