The Swedish city of Gothenburg will start a two-year digital road condition data collection project in order to improve the efficiency of winter road maintenance.
The municipality is working with ViaPM, Nira Dynamics and the Luleå University of Technology to use fixed sensors and mobile sensors on vehicles for gathering information, according to Håkan Johansson, head of planning at the city of Gothenburg. Among data to be collected is that from vehicle-mounted sensors which continuously note road friction.
The goal of the project is to develop road condition forecasting models so Gothenburg’s maintenance machinery can react more quickly than at the moment to poor driving conditions. Also, not as much de-icing material would be needed. Maintenance vehicles, such as snow ploughs, would spend time only where they can be most effective and so cut down on time on the road, thereby reducing vehicle emissions.
An added benefit is that cycle lanes and bus lanes would be cleared more efficiently and so improve public transport times for commuters.
ViaPM is a construction management and inspection consultancy based in Gothenburg. Nira Dynamics, headquartered in Linköping, Sweden, is a specialist road condition data company within the Volkswagen Group.
Nira recently signed an agreement with Global Weather Corporation for use of its RoadWX data service that forecasts weather and road surface conditions that vehicles will encounter within minutes or hours, worldwide. Global Weather says that its RoadWX data integrates with connected vehicle data to enable road weather safety alerts, route optimisation, autonomous system engagement and disengagement, rideshare fleet deployment and transportation decision systems.
RoadWX’s proprietary RoadWeather technology models the thermal physics of the road to estimate these complex road conditions and forecast their evolution.
Global Weather Corporation, based in Boulder, in the US state of Colorado, is a weather data services company formed by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research Foundation. UCAR is a non-profit consortium of more than 115 North American colleges and universities focused on research and training in the earth system sciences. The corporation also manages the US National Center for Atmospheric Research on behalf of the National Science Foundation.
Nira said that the number of connected vehicles with its algorithms is growing rapidly and will reach 1.7 million sometime this year.
