Project Brief

Alaska’s Department of Transportation (DOT) maintains a system of highways that spans great distances and provides access to some of the most remote areas in the country.  DOT is tasked with maintaining this road system year-round, often in the face of extreme adverse weather conditions common to Alaska.

To assist its maintenance and operations staff, as well as the driving public, DOT maintains an information system that provides real-time road weather information.  Sensors buried beneath the pavement provide ground temperature information while meteorological stations provide detailed atmospheric and surface information, as well as real-time camera images that provide visual guidance about road surface condition. This data is provided through the Road Weather Information System (RWIS), which is a critical tool for providing and maintaining safe roadways in Alaska.

Wostmann has developed and supported RWIS from its conception. After the initial build, new enhancements were included such as the RWIS network health reporting system, which provides a visual dashboard and on-demand reporting that assist RWIS administrators in remotely identifying sensor outages and other problems with specific RWIS sites. As with many of the systems that Wostmann has developed and maintained, RWIS relies upon and links to data from other agencies like the FAA.

More recently, we rebuilt the application to meet the growing needs of the department and the public. It has been rearchitected to utilize the Azure cloud and be more extendable, allowing integration of future data sources with ease. The UI was redesigned by our team to be more intuitive, reactive, and meet expectations of modern users. Wostmann also migrated local servers to the Azure tenant.

RWIS can be accessed at http://roadweather.alaska.gov/iways/roadweather