Rapid incident detection in tunnels through acoustic monitoring – opera rating experiences in austrian road tunnels

AKUT is an innovative tunnel safety system based on the automatic detection of abnormal noises. Analyses on all live AKUT systems show that all relevant incidents in these tunnels were first detected by AKUT. The head start provided by AKUT in these incidents ranged from several seconds to over 11 minutes. Furthermore, false alarms were also explained. The analyses resulted in very low numbers of false alarms, which when paired with the high detection performance, led to extremely positive feedback from the operator. Aspects of microphone maintenance and cleaning will also be discussed using experience gained in a tunnel that has been operating for 8 years.