Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MFDS (Multi-Functional Detective System (MFDS) – Advanced, ‘Intelligent Transport System’ creating smarter and safer European roads)

Teaser

Everyday, people die or get injured on Europe’s roads. In 2015, there were 26,100 EU road fatalities. Since 2011, the EC have been carrying out an ambitious road safety programme to cut road deaths significantly with a target to reduce to zero by 2050. The EC promote the use...

Summary

Everyday, people die or get injured on Europe’s roads. In 2015, there were 26,100 EU road fatalities. Since 2011, the EC have been carrying out an ambitious road safety programme to cut road deaths significantly with a target to reduce to zero by 2050. The EC promote the use of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) with the aim of providing innovative services relating to different modes of transport and traffic management whilst enabling a variety users to be better informed and make safer, more coordinated, smarter use of transport networks.

With traffic density increasing in heavily populated countries, particularly in Central EU, measures are required to enable safe and fluid traffic guidance. Further road construction opportunities are limited due to cost and space limitations therefore roads must get smarter to expand their capacity, such as by using ITS technologies. The problem of wrong-way driver errors needs a solution that will better alert oncoming drivers of the imminent hazard. Addressing wrong-way driving will result in a reduction of road accidents and thus, the associated suffering would reduce. In addition, at overcrowded motorway truck parking lots, danger zones appear when truckers park in lot entrances and exits resulting in a high potential for accidents. This occurs when truckers are forced to accept this risk in order to comply with driving and rest break EU rules and they are unable to search for a parking space any longer. ITS-technologies that display free space in real time will improve parking usage and reduce these risks. Resulting from these benefits of fewer collisions and decreased traffic, we expect for Europe to experience a reduction in CO2 emissions.

A number of solutions are in development based on costly radar or camera systems that offer limited functionality. At Wilhelm Schröder GmbH (Schröder), in collaboration with universities and industry experts, the globally unique Multi-Functional Detective System (MFDS) for all ITS applications has been developed.

Our patent pending solution is a unique, affordable and unrestricted technology capable of solving these issues in a single system being low-cost to procure and install with low-power usage. An MFDS unit consists of a detection of 6 delineators (pillars) that distributes a secure radio field across the target path; objects within the radio field are passively detected and classified. The radio field in the master post detects objects classifying its size as well as its direction of travel. In addition to pure detection and counting of vehicles as in State-Of-the-Art, different vehicle classes over several lanes of traffic can be monitored thus providing traffic flow data. MFDS is capable of handling this and other functions simultaneously with relevant data available to control centres and municipalities for traffic management by secure cloud access.

To realise sales, we must generate full customer confidence in performance and commercial benefit generation at scale under commercial operating conditions. The specific objectives and associated Phase 1 Feasibility study activities are designed to achieve this.
• Technical and commercial risk assessed and mitigations identified
• Business model and sales figures validated against market conditions
• Innovation project work plan and budget
• Marketing strategies developed
• Five-year business model

Work performed

During the Feasibility Study delivery, we have:
• scoped the size of the target market by collecting and assessing market data found online and have combined this with market consultation feedback to produce a conservative share estimation calculation for the likely market penetration of the first 5 years and 10 years of commercial sales;
• adapted our Phase 2 project objectives based on market input as to their buying drivers to ensure that this stakeholder input is of key focus during development;
• assessed the legislative pathway for our target deployment locations to ensure that the MFDS design meets the local legislation and for the design to be adaptable based on the varying needs from country to country;
• identified our Phase 2 project partners, suppliers and subcontractors
• planned the Phase 2 project workplan, estimated the project budget and identified the employment needs to be able to deliver the project during the 24 –month planned project length;
• further developed our business plan to better consider identified risks and opportunities as well as having adapted the commercial and financial strategy based on the knowledge gained during Feasibility Study market consultation and market data collection

The results achieved from this Feasibility Study are commercially sensitive. A such, the information gained as described above will remain confidential to Wilhelm Schröder GmbH.

Final results

Competitor solutions are typically complex, expensive and technologically limited. MFDS USPs complement the market needs perfectly as a high tech, low cost system. Competitor systems are generally limited to a single function, e.g. traffic counting or parking accounting making integration challenging. Because of a multitude of application possibilities, MFDS can be utilised in almost all areas of traffic telematics.

The expected impacts of the MFDS project once commercialised are best described using a PESTEL analysis:
• Political: By warning of wrong-way-drivers and other road hazards, the EU’s target to reduce road fatality to zero by 2050, will be greatly supported by MFDS
• Economic: Schröder and our supply chain expect to experience exponential growth. Further, by reducing traffic congestion in Europe and reduces transport delays, MFDS positively impacts the EU economy. By making roads more efficient, there is a reduced requirement to build new road networks.
• Social/Health: By reducing risk of collision and reducing traffic congestion, MFDS will reduce the number of highway related fatalities and injuries as well as reduce emissions from EU roads.
• Technological: As a novel technology, we expect for MFDS developments to progress European road safety as well as having alternative market overlap opportunity.
• Legal/Standards: Currently, there are no European SOA standards for traffic information systems, other than the data standard DATEX II (supported by MFDS), due to the functionality improvements offered over the State-Of-the-Art competitors, these being: traffic data generation and information collection in a single system architecture, we identify opportunity to become the standard for Traffic Information Systems.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.mfds.eu/.