Report
Teaser, summary, work performed and final results
Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Klimator-RSI (Connected cars for real time smart road maintenance and increased driving safety)
Teaser
Correct road maintenance is crucial for ensuring good traffic flow and to maintain safety standards for road users. Safety is one of the most critical factors in road maintenance with over 26,000 lives lost on EU roads alone with another 135,000 seriously injured with the...
Summary
Correct road maintenance is crucial for ensuring good traffic flow and to maintain safety standards for road users. Safety is one of the most critical factors in road maintenance with over 26,000 lives lost on EU roads alone with another 135,000 seriously injured with the total social cost estimated at €100 bn. Adverse weather conditions are the primary source of road accidents, with the risk increased by nine times on snowy roads and 20 times on icy roads.
Current conventional methods for monitoring and forecasting road conditions have several disadvantages such as; cannot present real-time road surface data for an entire region at road level or are too costly to implement of whole road networks. These disadvantages mean that winter road maintenance is still undertaken using the experience and decision making of the staff without the use of real-time data to aid decision making.
To address this need, KLIMATOR presents its Road Status Information Technology, which uses unique algorithms to interpret three key data sources to monitor and predict road surface conditions on an entire road network with a well-designed and clear user interface. Our algorithms then process this data which can be represented on a visual map of the whole road network. RSI allows contractors to decrease 20-30% of winter road maintenance costs while increasing the safety and efficiency of the roads by keeping them open and decreasing costs (-5% vehicle wear, -20% fuel usage).
The data produced using this system will also be provided to OEMs (car manufacturers) as a friction mapping service, to give drivers and autonomous cars real-time information to increase safety.
Work performed
\"During the first period in the project, we focused on expanding and fine-tuning our models. The most critical aspect of the development was to generate models that can handle substantial amounts of data. Within a few years, we will witness an exponential growth in connected cars on our roads; our models have consequently been advanced to manage and process this future increase of data.
Moreover, the models have been reconstructed to produce better and more reliable road information; this improvement has produced excellent results as we recently received feedback from our reference groups using RSI during the winter season 2018/2019. The development is especially recognised in RSIs exact measurements of the road temperature which is seldom far from the ground truth.
As a consequence of the upscaling of the models, we will be capable of providing larger road networks, in numerous countries, with precise and reliable road information. We are looking at an expansion of 200% during winter 2019/20.
Parallel, to the upscaling of our models, an advancement of our data handling and cloud infrastructure has been completed. Not only shall our models withstand the enormous increase in data but also the processing, storage and flow of it. To facilitate the expansion of data the development team has completed an extremely comprehensive improvement of our data and cloud infrastructure. This has resulted in quicker, more reliable and overall greater data handling within the system.
Today the models can cover up to 60,000,000 km of road in streams of up to 10 TFLOPS, with 20 million cars operating on the network. As a whole, the system is capable of storing 500 Tb physical database storage and 500 Tb of cloud infrastructure storage. We consider this a significant advancement from the original system and are very satisfied with the results obtained from work performed during period one.
Further, to provide our reference groups with the information they demand from RSI we have developed a new graphical user interphase (GUI). The GUI represents the information provided by RSI by visualising all the information on a map, that is relevant for the reference user. Therefore, the old RSI GUI was thrown out, and a new one was developed. The newly designed GUI is built based on previous feedbacks and workshops held with key users.
In addition to the newly developed GUI, a mobile app was also built, it can be found in Appstore and on google play, under the name \"\"Road Status Information\"\".
Parallel to the technical development the business team has worked intensely with commercialisation activities around the world. During period one we were able to attend and exhibit at seven different locations, from the TRB conference in Washington to the ITS conference in Copenhagen. These exhibitions has helped us display for, as well as inform, new potential customers. From these dissemination activities, we have gained both customers as well as potential buyers in multiple regions and countries. We have also been able to increase our awareness amongst OEMs, as it is evident that autonomous cars cannot drive in wintery conditions without the precise and reliable road status information we provide. We are currently involved in multiple proofs of concepts with OEMs and have the opportunity to show our solution within this industry.
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Final results
KLIMATOR’s innovative technology uses unique algorithms to interpret critical data sources to monitor and predict road surface conditions on an entire road network with a well-designed and clear user interface. KLIMATOR-RSI increases the accuracy of road status data thanks to the creation of a massive network of connected cars (Floating Car Data-FCD) made of vehicles circulating on real-time through each road segment.
Our climate model uses meteorological data, and our algorithms processes this together with FCD and GIS data to interpret and transform it into precise and reliable road weather information of a whole network. The information can be represented on a visual map or accessed via an API that our customers gain access to.
This is integrated into the user interface and provide a clear warning when the individual segments of road need actions such as de-icing or gritting to assist road authorities and maintenance contractors.
KLIMATOR offers many advantages over conventional technologies; such as:
• Information about the entire road network
• Real-time measurements of road surface conditions
• Capacity to deliver accurate forecasting information
• Integration of road maintenance data
• Huge Floating Car Data network to provide accurate real on-time data.
• Easy and cheap to implement and operate
• Road maintenance specific user interface with clear instructions
• Reductions in costs for operators
Website & more info
More info: http://www.klimator.se.