Road Maintenance
As a contractor, you already know about Road Weather Information Systems (RWIS), and they’ve surely helped you plan your measures in the past. But, while they can tell you the weather, what they will not do is estimate the amount of residual salt on the road surface. And they won’t alert you to the ice patches on that particular shadowy stretch behind the trees, either.
Now imagine if you could take the guesswork out of road maintenance almost completely, by relying on multiple sources of information instead of only one. Then imagine having all this information readily available – literally at the touch of a button.
Based on state-of-the-art research from climatology and friction estimation, Road Status Information (RSI) is a groundbreaking software taking road maintenance to a whole new level, improving resource utilization and reducing environmental impact.
By combining and assessing data from Road Weather Information Systems, radar and satellite images, weather prognoses and floating car data (such as friction and temperature) RSI provides a detailed real-time picture of the current road status.It can also give uncannily accurate prognoses of future road conditions – an invaluable decision-support whenever you’re planning measures ahead of time – and thanks to advanced machine learning it’s becoming even more accurate as we speak.
It probably goes without saying, but traditional systems just can’t compete.
How taxis can make our roads safer.
Two winters in a row, taxis have been cruising the roads of Sweden, automatically gathering vital road information using software from NIRA.
With Road Surface Information (RSI) vital road data, such as friction, can be gathered completely without the use of cameras. The data can then be shared in a connected vehicle cloud and used by drivers and road authorities alike – significantly increasing the safety on our roads.
The more cars using RSI the better, of course – as that equals more data – which is why NIRA has teamed up with Infocar and the Swedish Transport Administration to provide a large number of taxis with the software. A process which is actually very simple; as the software can be installed via the OBD interface of the car.
The project, which began in the winter 2016/2017, was instantly successful, as more than 10 000 kilometers of data could be collected. During the winter 2017/2018, that number was increased to a whopping 24 000. But as we see it, we have only just begun. Soon, we’ll be looking at more than a thousand taxis collecting vital road data all over Sweden. It’s safe to say our roads have never before been mapped out this good.
