Determining Strategic Locations for Environmental Sensor Stations with Weather-Related Crash Data

Adverse weather leads to more than 1.5 million vehicular crashes, resulting in 800,000 injuries and 7,000 fatalities nationally. The appropriate deployment of roadway weather information systems (RWIS) has been considered an effective strategy to address safety concerns. However, the current practice of selecting the locations of RWIS stations depends primarily on the knowledge and experiences of field operators. Limited research has been conducted on methodologies that can identify RWIS locations systematically on the basis of widely available safety and geographic information system (GIS) data. This paper proposes a spatial optimization method to identify strategic locations for deploying RWIS stations within a large regional transportation network. Weather-related crash data were converted to a safety concern index and then used to examine routes that provided good spatial coverage of the region for optimal locations for RWIS stations through a maximization algorithm. The proposed method is evaluated with crash and GIS data from a tri-county region in Texas with the coverage for each RWIS station assumed to be 10 mi. The resulting locations illustrate the promising potential for the proposed RWIS location optimization algorithm. Additional sensitivity analysis is also conducted with an evaluation of the resulting changes from yearly crash data variations.