Bridge and roadway frost: occurrence and prediction by use of an expert system

Abstract

An expert system designed to provide 20-h forecasts of roadway and bridge frost has been constructed from analysis of meteorological conditions and has been evaluated against human forecasters. The expert system, when supplied with perfect forecasts of commonly forecast meteorological variables, produced accuracy comparable to or higher than human forecasters. Human forecasters were observed to provide relatively unbiased forecasts for bridge frost but were highly biased toward reducing false alarms for roadway frost. The expert system, by contrast, is configured so that the decision threshold can be adjusted to give unbiased forecasts or forecasts that are biased in either direction without significant degradation of accuracy. -from Author