Vaisala and Yotta are offering a combined solution to enable UK councils to collect data across their road network and use it to make decisions about repairs.
The solution features Vaisala's RoadAI product, which uses video data and computer vision to assess highway conditions. Yotta’s asset management software solutions Horizons and Alloy then interpret the data and use it to provide rapid insight into future planning and maintenance needs.
Vaisala says UK councils and highway authorities can use its technology to replace their existing road condition survey methodologies which are much slower to collect data and may be inconsistent and subjective.
Clients of the partnership benefit from what Vaisala calls “early intervention asset management”.
Using Vaisala RoadAI, engineers can collect geospatial video data when they go out on the network, either responding to an ad hoc call out or as part of a routine network or safety inspection.
Clients can process video data to produce condition surveys that allow them to move away from the need to book a survey with an external agency when they have the resource available and then plan it six to 12 months in advance.
It also gives councils the opportunity to undertake condition surveys on a risk-based approach following the inspection regime.
The company insists the early intervention asset management and partnership allows councils to pick up defects on the network as soon as they start to occur.
According to Vaisala, this enables them to intervene early and target their treatment plans at minor defects just starting to emerge, in turn allowing them to implement lower cost treatments like sealing up and surface dressing to prevent them deteriorating further over time.
Ben Brown, head of road asset management at Vaisala, says: “Our joint solution allows clients to cover much more of their network than a conventional survey."
"This means they can compress the programme time. So, instead of having to plan to undertake a data collection one year, and then wait to receive the results, interpret them, and think about carrying out maintenance the following year, they can do the data collection and develop the plan in weeks and even carry out the maintenance programme, all within the same season.”
