Journal of the Japanese Society of Snow and Ice

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A smart salting system has been operating on expressways managed by NEXCO Hokkaido since the 2015 winter season. For the practical operation of this system, a subsystem plays important roles. The subsystem overrides the automated operations of the smart salting system and provides human judgements when the automatic salting decision is not appropriate. Two subsystems have been used: the 2015-2017 subsystem and the 2018 subsystem. The present study investigates the amount of salt reduction achieved in each winter from 2015 to 2018 and quantifies the effect of the 2018 subsystem on salt reduction. The 2018 subsystem was improved to make it easier for the commander of NEXCO Hokkaido to use automatic salting provided by the smart salting system that can change salting rate by each 100m section according to the road surface conditions. Then, the use of 2018 subsystem achieved an increase of automatic salting by 271 times over the 2015-2017 subsystem. In addition, the 2018 subsystem achieved a salt reduction of 122.7 t more than that achieved by the 2015-2017 subsystem. We made a clear comparison of the two subsystems in terms of salt reduction achieved. The 2018 subsystem achieved a greater salt reduction while maintaining the same safety and traveling performance, and maintained the winter service level of the expressways.

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