A Smart Winter Service Platform and Route Planning Algorithm

Winter service operations are one of many responsibilities of local authorities essential for public safety. Consisting of snow removal and spreading de-icing material, operations require the assignment of significant resources in terms of vehicles and personnel. For that reason, the development of tools enabling authorities to engage in the transparent monitoring and planning of the snow removal and de-icing operations is beneficial for the community. In this work, a smart winter service platform is designed for the transparent monitoring of the operation and a vehicle route planning algorithm is designed as a decision support system for the operation center. The platform consists of an electronic control unit attached to the vehicle for monitoring and data collection, which is transferred to the cloud for analytics and reporting purposes. In the cloud, distributed big data technologies are used for fault-tolerance and fast processing. Web and mobile applications have been developed for visualization and increasing public awareness of the operations.