Case Study: Alaska Department of Transportation achieves hyper-local road monitoring to keep highways open and cut maintenance costs with Microsoft Azure

How Alaska outsmarts Mother Nature in the cloud

The Alaska Department of Transportation & Public Facilities (ADOT&PF) faced a persistent challenge: extreme, highly variable Alaskan weather—and no ground-level pavement data—to guide costly snow-and-ice responses across a vast, remote network of roads. After the 2010 “Icepocalypse” left thousands of lane-miles iced over and exposed gaps in forecasting, the agency needed hyper-local, mobile insights to avoid overdeploying crews, reduce risk to drivers, and stretch shrinking budgets.

ADOT&PF partnered with Fathym to deploy WeatherCloud mobile sensors on maintenance vehicles and integrate that telemetry into Microsoft Azure’s IoT and analytics services and the department’s Maintenance Decision Support System. The solution delivers real-time pavement and local-weather data and forecasts, allowing crews to act proactively; in a 2016 freezing-rain event it prevented accidents, and ADOT&PF reports substantial operational savings (hundreds of thousands annually), improved crew efficiency, and deployment on 70 vehicles so far—with other states showing up to ~80% accident reductions using similar systems.

Alaska Department of Transportation

Daniel Schacher

Maintenance Superintendent