How Svevia is Optimizing Winter Road Maintenance with Data-Driven Decision Support

About Svevia

Svevia is Sweden's largest company specializing in the operation and maintenance of roads and infrastructure. As a state-owned enterprise, Svevia is responsible for managing more than 50% of Sweden's road network, spanning major highways, regional routes, and rural roads across the country.

Ensuring safe and accessible roads during Sweden's harsh winter season is one of Svevia's most critical responsibilities. The organization operates a fleet of over 1,900 employees dedicated to winter maintenance, deploying plows, salt spreaders, and other equipment to keep the national road network safe and passable throughout the winter months.

The Challenge

Sweden's winters are demanding. Road conditions can shift dramatically within short distances and over brief periods of time, creating significant operational complexity for maintenance teams. Svevia's traditional approach to winter maintenance relied heavily on weather forecast data and scheduled manual inspections to determine when and where to deploy resources.

While this approach provided a reasonable baseline, it had fundamental limitations. Weather forecasts describe atmospheric conditions, not the actual state of the road surface. Ice can form on one stretch of road while an adjacent section remains clear, and a salting treatment applied hours earlier may have been washed away by rain or worn down by traffic. Without a continuous, real-time view of actual road conditions, Svevia's operations teams were making critical decisions based on incomplete information.

The consequences of this information gap were tangible: resources were sometimes deployed reactively rather than proactively, manual inspection rounds consumed significant staff time, and the true picture of the road network at any given moment remained uncertain. Svevia sought a solution that would provide a continuous, accurate, and granular view of road surface conditions across the entire network they maintain.

The Solution

Svevia partnered with NIRA Dynamics to implement Winter Road Insights (WRI), a platform that transforms data from ordinary connected vehicles traveling the road network into a real-time map of road surface conditions. Rather than relying on fixed sensor stations or scheduled inspections, WRI continuously aggregates friction, temperature, and surface condition signals from vehicles already on the road.

The result is a living, constantly updated picture of the entire road network. Svevia's operations teams can access an intuitive, map-based dashboard that shows the current state of roads across their entire area of responsibility, updated in near real-time as vehicles traverse the network.

"The focus is on decision support — giving operators a clearer, data-driven picture of where attention is needed most, based on the TRUE road situation delivered by vehicles."

The platform enables Svevia's winter operations teams to:

• Monitor real-time road surface conditions across the entire road network simultaneously, without dispatching inspection vehicles
• Compare weather forecast predictions against actual measured road conditions to validate or adjust operational plans
• Identify specific road segments requiring immediate treatment, enabling targeted and efficient resource deployment
• Reduce the number of manual inspection rounds needed, freeing staff for direct maintenance activities
• Perform post-event analysis to evaluate the effectiveness of treatments and continuously refine winter maintenance strategies
  
  

The Results

With Winter Road Insights integrated into daily operations, Svevia has gained a clear, data-driven understanding of how winter maintenance performs across their road network.

The platform provides visibility into how much of the network fulfills Trafikverket’s maintenance requirements at any given time, enabling teams to track operational performance with much greater precision. After implementing vehicle-based road condition data, Svevia consistently achieved 98–100% compliance with the required service levels.

Performance tracking showing Svevia reaching 98–100% fulfillment of Trafikverket’s winter maintenance requirements.

Beyond real-time monitoring, Winter Road Insights enables deeper operational analysis. Svevia can compare winter maintenance performance across different seasons, regions, and contractors, making it easier to identify where operations are performing well and where improvements are needed.

One example is the ability to compare road performance against a broader reference network, revealing how quickly slippery conditions are treated and how long the effects of anti-slip measures last.

Comparison with a reference network showing faster anti-slip response and longer-lasting treatment effects.

The data also makes it possible to evaluate the effectiveness of different tools, chemicals, and machines, helping teams understand which strategies deliver the best results under different conditions.

Together, these insights create a continuous feedback loop for improvement and operational learning. By understanding what works best across the network, Svevia can refine winter maintenance strategies over time while providing operators with clearer information and a more confident working environment.