Some drivers were stuck for eight hours in Birmingham in January

The "Ice-Miser" combines thermal and aerial view mapping to provide forecasts for every 20 metres of road.

It aims to prevent a repeat of the road chaos caused a month ago in Birmingham by ice and snow.

The system is the work of Entice Technology Ltd, a company set up at the university by its own scientists.

The university said the Ice-Miser was the work of the same team that produced the first generation of ice prediction methods in the 1980s.

It is time to update the decision making process as to when to salt roads - the current systems belong to the last century Dr John E Thornes

Birmingham has more than 1,000 km of road, but currently uses only one road forecast centre to make its decisions on road salting for the whole of the city, the university said.

But the new system will provide an extensive database with profiles for every 20 km of road in the city.

The profile includes aerial photographs of each road which enables the database to calculate how much sunlight each road gets to show the high-risk areas.

The team at Entice believes its invention will do a better job of identifying which areas of the road network are most at risk from freezing than current technology allows.

Dr John E Thornes, reader in applied meteorology and director of Entice, said the system now had to be marketed to the 300 authorities across England responsible for salting roads.

"Weather forecasts are far more accurate than they were 20 years ago and our new system will gather overnight temperatures to find out which roads will be affected.

"It is time to update the decision making process as to when to salt roads - the current systems belong to the last century".

Dr Thornes said his team had just received a research grant to develop a similar system for the rail network.

The Ice-Miser was officially launched at the university on Wednesday morning.