Project description
European road maintenance in the cloud
European roads are scarred by potholes, despite a whopping EUR 6 billion spent on maintenance each year. The problem is an inefficient corrective strategy for pavement reparations due to the high costs of human inspection services. No targeted, ecological and efficient preventive works strategy exists. The EU-funded PAV-DT project is working on a solution. It is developing new inexpensive disruptive technology that exploits an advanced algorithm, a cloud-platform to be installed and used in any vehicle. This equipment makes detecting and reporting information about road problems immediate, cheap and easy. In turn, this ensures that necessary repairs and maintenance are undertaken in time.
Objective
Despite the huge public budget effort (6.000M€/year) for road pavement maintenance, the European road network (5.5M km) is not in an acceptable condition. Current pavement maintenance strategies are mainly based on corrective maintenance which is an inefficient and costly approach, with negative impact on pavement service life and road safety, and also on the environment.
In order to be able to implement a maintenance strategy based on preventive operations of much lower cost carried out at the optimal moment (predictive maintenance), it is necessary to have continuous and accurate information of the pavement condition, something that is not possible at present due to the high cost of current inspection services.
PAV-DT is a disruptive technology that can be installed in any customer vehicle (e.g. public road administrators and concessionaires or construction companies on performance-based maintenance contracts) in order to convert these vehicles into a very low-cost real-time pavement inspection equipment through its ordinary circulation. Additionally, thanks to our advanced algorithm and a cloud-based platform, customers will be able to access the latest available information on the pavement condition at any moment and receive information on which maintenance actions are really required, and exactly where they should be applied and when is the best moment to deploy a truly cost-effective maintenance strategy.
PAV-DT consortium formed by APPLUS (Spain), BECSA (Spain), M&S (Austria), MICRO-SENSOR (Germany) and IMM-UPV (Spain) agreed on creating a Joint Venture for the commercial exploitation of the results as soon as the project is completed through a Product-as-a-service business model. Revenues of more than 38.8M€, with an associated profit of 25.5M€ and the creation of 52 new highly qualified jobs are expected within the first 3 years. Thanks to this investment in PAV-DT, these customers will experience savings of more than 746M€ over that period.
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Funding Scheme
IA - Innovation actionCoordinator
12100 CASTELLON
Spain