Every year billions of euros are overspent on road construction and repaving due to over-use of asphalt material, re-paving due to poor road quality resulting from not adhering to best practices, and downtime of pavers and crew on account of lack of material- and logistics planning. The problem is that it is difficult to construct a road – it requires men and machinery working together in a non-stop process that should be subject to tight control and monitoring to maintain all parameters within their specifications. Today, there are no available tools to do this. Contractors rely entirely on the knowhow of their paver operations crew, who are becoming increasingly unskilled as the attractiveness of this job is declining, and no road quality measurements can be performed before after-the-fact, resulting in excessive repaving and lower durability.
The MatManager project aims to utilize modern technologies including digitialization and IOT to make available a tool for both contractors and road authorities for overcoming these obstacles. The MatManager project will enable contractors to perform instant and continuous quality measurements, and deliver real-time performance feedback to the operator as well as full accountability of paving performance to road authorities. The digital MatWiser platform provides a tool for creating benchmarks, and further analyzing performance for future improvements in material utilization, quality and process management.
This will help the road construction industry eliminate the massive overuse of finite resources – material, machinery and manpower – all of which are not only costly for society, but have a large climatic footprint on the entire globe.
The overall objective of the MatManager project is to finalize the development to bring it to TRL 9 and validate the new solution in a large-scale pilot to enable full commercialization.
