Project description
Immediate alerts of hazardous road conditions
To keep traffic flowing and road users safe, it’s important to maintain roads. Weather conditions greatly affect road conditions. Snowy and icy roads, for instance, increase the risk of road accidents. Current methods for monitoring and forecasting road conditions cannot present real-time road surface data for an entire region. In this context, the EU-funded Klimator-RSI project proposes a new system that 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. The data can be processed and represented on a visual map of the whole road network and can also be sold to car manufacturers as a friction mapping service for drivers and autonomous vehicles.
Objective
Correct road maintenance is crucial for ensuring good traffic flow and to maintain safety standards for road users. Safety is one of the most important 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 risk increased by 9 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 3 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 increase 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 sold to OEM car manufacturers as a friction mapping service, to give drivers and autonomous cars real-time information to increase safety.
Our business opportunity relies on an estimated Total Available Market, within the EU alone, of €54M for our RSI system and another €4M for our initial friction mapping service. We estimate the RSI project will allow us to generate a cumulative net income of €27.8M in the period 2020-23 and a ROI of 13.97 achieving the breakeven during 2022.
Fields of science
- engineering and technologymechanical engineeringvehicle engineeringautomotive engineeringautonomous vehicles
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesdatabases
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesphysical geographycartographygeographic information systems
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringinformation engineeringtelecommunicationstelecommunications networksdata networks
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuels
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-2 - SME instrument phase 2Coordinator
405 30 GOTEBORG
Sweden
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.