Efforts are presently underway within federal and state government to develop prototype Maintenance Decision Support Systems (MDSS) for winter transportation maintenance. The purpose of these systems will be to provide greater efficiency and cost savings within maintenance divisions of state departments of transportation (DOTs) while promoting better safety on public highways. A premise followed in these efforts is that the final development and deployment of operational Maintenance Decision Support Systems will be made by the private sector through a competitive bid process similar to existing methods state DOTs follow for winter maintenance weather services. The challenge with the design of an MDSS is how to construct a generalized client-side framework that promotes the use of components from differing private sector entities in a manner often referred to as plug-and-play. The success of designing such a generalized framework will result in the long-term use of the framework by state DOTs without the need to make continual costly investments in technology exchanges between vendor systems as weather service providers change.

This paper presents a conceptual overview of the challenges that must be overcome by both public and private sector interests to develop such a plug-and-play system. The efficacy of the concept is described as it relates to the possible new paradigm that will result in how the private sector provides weather services to the surface transportation industry. The paper also describes the efforts underway as part of a multi-year, multi-state pooled fund study to develop and deploy an operational MDSS and to integrate plug-and-play into this system’s design.