Gütersloh: Sensor data instead of control drives in winter maintenance

Driving through the city at night to check which roads need gritting — that is how winter maintenance worked in Gütersloh until now. The City of Gütersloh, Germany, is replacing those control drives with measurements:
14 DL-SFV Non-invasive Road Surface
Condition and Temperature Sensors and 14 DL-ATM41G2 Eleven Parameter Weather Stations from Decentlab at 13 locations across the city.

The DL-SFV points down at the roadway and detects whether the surface state is dry, wet, moist, snowy or icy. Further it reports friction, road surface temperature, ice thickness, dew point and more condition parameters. Purely physical measurements, no imaging. A solar panel on the pole supplies its power, while the battery-operated DL-ATM41G2 records air temperature, humidity, precipitation, wind and solar radiation around the clock. In many places our DL-CWS2 provides high-precision road surface temperatures for winter maintenance — Gütersloh combines a set of road surface condition parameters with full weather data.

All data flows via LoRaWAN® into Urban Stack, the city's own urban data platform. The road service can now decide precisely where and when to grit — avoiding unnecessary journeys and reducing road salt, which saves cost and protects the environment.

The sensors are not limited to winter: Gütersloh also uses them for example for stormwater management, and plans to apply them to heavy rainfall monitoring and climate change adaptation. The project runs within the German federal programme Modellprojekte Smart Citiesmade in Germany.

The system was installed by LB Elektro- und Verkehrsanlagenbau together with our partner iot-shop — the same constellation as in the District of Hof, which we reported last year.

German broadcaster WDR visited the project on site and shows in its television report how the smart winter service works.

We're glad to see our sensors at work in Gütersloh — winter can come.

Watch the WDR report

→ Explore Decentlab's winter maintenance solutions