Cold Comfort, the UK's leading winter service event, successfully transitioned to a new home this month and revealed major breakthroughs in the sector, including new AI.
On 21-22 of May, Cold Comfort co-located with Traffex in Coventry, with many exhibitors on social media suggesting it had been 'the best Cold Comfort for years'.
Matt Eglinton, head of local highways policy at the Department for Transport, gave the keynote address and outlined the department’s work in resilience on local roads.
He also addressed the ongoing government challenge to find a funding model for the National Winter Service Research Group (NWSRG).
‘We are trying to build something that is sustainable and not just a one-off. That is a challenge for me. My remit is the unringfenced, capital elements. We are a small team so it’s challenging to understand what research needs to take place. There is a lot of rigour in deciding government spending.
‘I spend a lot of time with UK Roads Leadership Group; NWSRG obviously sits underneath that group. We are in talks and submitting ideas to ministers. There are obviously other options and other departments. Winter maintenance is a foundational area for resilience – so I would encourage the sector to come together and consider if we all put some money in, and crowdfund it, we can all benefit. We are considering this issue and have options but there are wider options out there too.’
Alex van den Hoek, senior advisor for winter at the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management of the Netherlands, also gave a star turn.
He revealed that his country will soon integrate AI into its winter resilience services.
‘We are building our own new platform to combine data and to deploy to the user with a large language model like ChatGPT. The first version will be done on 1 October. We are doing that with Microsoft because they are specialists in AI.
‘We are trying to connect different data sources in an integration layer to give decision-makers scenarios. The AI will help combine the data and you can ask the model if we have these certain conditions how many times was there an incident – it will tell you under the same circumstances we had the following results so it can help decision-makers take action.’
