ESERCOM-D: Safe and efficient roads

Road wear is a widespread problem and places a significant financial burden on infrastructure maintenance. The early and detailed detection and mapping of road wear can reduce these costs whilst extending the service life of road surfaces. Building on the preliminary project ESRIUM (TRL 6), which was successfully completed in November 2023, the consortium has identified the next necessary technological and standardisation steps required for market entry. The overarching aim of ESERCOM-D is to facilitate standardisation efforts through the implementation of a highly advanced system (TRL 8) that promotes more environmentally friendly and intelligent road use, optimises road maintenance and enhances road safety. In doing so, the project demonstrates the automation of the entire chain, from road condition monitoring through to intelligent decision-making.

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.

ESERCOM-D: First cross-border test

In the first project period (10/2024-03/2026) the ESERCOM-D Road Wear Sensor System (RWSS) was finalized and extensively tested on the Austrian motorway network. Furthermore, its performance was also evaluated in suburban environments and on rural roads. The system itself was redesigned and now reached TRL7 (system prototype demonstrated in an operational environment). To proof the usability beyond Austrians borders we were allowed to test the platform on the road network of one of the projects Expert Advisory Board members. This enabled the team to test the stability of all connections while changing into another wireless communication network.

600 GB of data were collected on a 165 km trip, consisting of camera data, LiDAR data and positioning data. To test the accuracy of the positioning data from the integrated cost-efficient EGNSS module a high-quality module ran in parallel. The data was processed and a Web Map Tile Service (WMTS) server has been configured so the results (detected defects) can be easily viewed in a web browser.

The next step is to compare the results of the two EGNSS modules to proof that the necessary localisation accuracy can be met with the hardware integrated in the platform. Furthermore, there will be a test on rural roads in Upper Austria where comparison data to high-end solutions is available.

To reach the final goal of a TRL8 system (completely built, tested, and qualified) the team is currently working on the integration of the results into existing road operator systems.