Objectives of the service
The objective is to create a complex product for digital, continuous, and automatic monitoring of transport infrastructure (TI), conditions of road, rail, and inland waterways. The product uses advanced algorithms to fuse 3D UHD infrastructure model, vehicle sensor data and satellite EO data. The product supports the identification of problems, potentially risky locations, or hazardous elements and report these findings to the operational maintenance centre where timely and precisely targeted TI inspection will be scheduled. Customers gain a powerful tool for identifying, analysing and specifying currently problematic as well as potentially risky areas and TI elements.
The first phase is the Feasibility study activity. The goal of the Feasibility study is to verify whether the intended innovative product is an effective solution to meet the needs of TI operators for assessing the condition of their infrastructure more effectively and in lower cost than currently possible.
Users and their needs
Key customers are transport infrastructure (TI) owners and operators, like highway & motorway operators, railtrack operators, operators of the inland water ways. They are all facing similar problems, drawbacks and limitations in efficiency of their day-by-day monitoring operations business. Most often it is the reactive and non-efficient maintenance; delayed and costly detection of defects on TI; Non-effective or non-existent automated TI cataloguing (including technical inventory); expensive on-situ & in-person inspections dealing with human factor and lack of personnel.
Other group of needs is dealing with data management, and processing, automation processing and generation of useful information with context and in time series.
It’s all about the responsibility for a large network of infrastructure that needs to be maintained and kept in 100% condition but with limited resources.
The primary user needs analysis were conducted in cooperation with Czech TI, however the product is applicable on European scale, while all TI operators are facing similar problems.
Service/ system concept
It utilise different sources of input data (on the left part of the figure), provides some kind of magic (i.e. data processing, algorithmic processing, comparison, fusion, etc. and provides specific outputs tailored to different users and their needs (on the right side).
Basic principle is build on the comparison of the evaluated ultra-high-definition (UHD) model with real situation. Based on this comparison, algorithms are trying to identify differences i.e. what is on the model, but missing in real environment (e.g. missing traffic sign), or vice-versa – there is something new identified in reality but not present in the model. The real situation is perceived by various sensors – e.g. low cost cameras at the vehicles´ front windows, EO images (low-cost as well as expensive), etc.
The other principle is in deep tech analysis of satellite EO images and datamining of important information. Examples of important information is – health of vegetation, identification unhealthy and dry trees in the forest alongside the TI, slope slide detection and vertical depreciation of infrastructure, etc.
Space Added Value
By leveraging data from EO (Copernicus and others commercial providers) and sensor data from vehicle fleets with GNSS (including Galileo) positioning information, the product provides near real-time TI condition awareness, enabling prompt reactions to sudden changes and improved information (and evidence) -based decision-making. This allows agile and timely response to emergencies, traffic disruptions, or any other critical event affecting TI. GNSS positioning is utilised for cataloguing and/or pre-selection of areas of interest and ad-hoc maintenance. EO represents a significant innovation with respect to what is the industry standard today, with rapidly increasing availability and accessibility of the data has the potential to replace many in-situ measurements and thus contributing to maintenance costs saving.
Current Status
Intensive and broad discussion with users were held. Together 5 face-to-face analytical sessions were conducted, collected 111 user requirements in total. These URs are identified amongst the rail, highway, and waterway TI operators. URs are structurally collected inside the database user register and distinguished into 5 categories: Monitoring activities; Process / workflow; Data; Integration into operational systems; Budget and costs.
This UR register is a very unique collection of insights of a broad variety employees and experts that are working on day-by-day basis on maintenance of the TI.
Following the UR collection a selected set of 5 representative use cases that reflect the most relevant and recurring operational needs were prepared. The use cases illustrate the potential applications of the proposed concept. All these Use-cases are evaluated from the perspective of data and processing algorithm needs, technical limitation of resources, system architecture is proposed including analysis of existing promising solutions. The overall feasibility of each use-case is finally performed.
Prime Contractor(s)
