ESERCOM-D: Sichere und effiziente Straßen

Road wear stands as a pervasive challenge and a significant financial burden in infrastructure upkeep. Detecting and mapping road wear early and in detail can alleviate these costs and simultaneously extend the lifespan of road surfaces. The project team successfully finalised the EGNSS-project ESRIUM (TRL 6) in November 2023, identified necessary technological and standardisation steps for entering into the market and targets this tender as an optimal window-of-opportunity for doing so. The overall objective of ESERCOM-D is to facilitate standardization efforts through the implementation of a demonstrable service (TRL 8), which fosters greener and smarter road usage, optimizes road maintenance, and increases road safety. In doing so, the automation of the complete chain from road condition monitoring to smart decision making will be demonstrated.

Moreover, the project seeks to establish, contact and create liaison with key standardization bodies and expand the utilization of EGNSS in the road and automotive industry. The goals emphasize the importance of aligning developments with international industry-accepted certification and standardization schemes.

Through comprehensive testing and validation in real-life environments, ESERCOM-D aims to provide proof of concept demonstrators for standardization concepts, ensuring the sustainable impact and widespread acceptance of its outcomes. The project's commitment to transparency, user acceptance assessment, and fostering sustainable impact underscores its excellence in addressing current challenges and pushing the boundaries of the state of the art in road wear assessment and maintenance.

Objectives of the project:

• Identification of standardization gaps, linkage to the relevant data value chain and derivation of standardization concepts
• Construction of the road wear sensor system at TRL 7
• Digital twin case study at one road operator
• Development of EGNSS-based localization systems providing accurate, reliable and authenticated position
• Assessment of impact and user acceptance

The implementation is based on three specific use cases:

• UseCase 1: Wear-map content provision

During the predecessor project ESRIUM a prototype of a road sensing and damage mapping system was developed. The system detects road damages with a sensor-equipped vehicle with an accuracy in the range of some centimetre. The collected data is mapped to the road network. The result is a road wear map. The road damages in the map include information about the type of road damage, the severity, and the time of detection. The system provides a software based interface to external systems to retrieve the information.

• Use Case 2: GNSS-corrections provision

The road operator provides delivers EGNSS-correction data to end users for enhancing the positioning accuracy of end users’ vehicles on different types of roads (highways and secondary road network) from meters to some centimetres. The data elements are provided via different communication channels, either C-ITS or directly via the EGNSS satellite or Internet. The position data is secured using Galileo’s OSNMA to support applications with high demands on the level of trust.

• Use Case 3: Infrastructure information & support

A traffic management system uses road wear data and incident related data (e.g., broken vehicle on the road) from the legacy traffic infrastructure to provide lane-specific warnings and recommendations to vehicle drivers via C-ITS. The information is generated automatically and and in near real-time based on the different data sources. The output of the data processing are safety-related messages or recommendations on changing the lane or the in-lane lateral offset. Drivers adapt their behaviour on the basis of the information provided.