Gaia-X 4 moveID
Road Condition Monitoring
Road Condition Monitoring
Vehicle data collection and road condition monitoring
We set up scalable collaboration models and decentralized infrastructures for private and public institutions to improve mobility and infrastructure services and to generate scalable digital twins. The ecosystem for digital services creates seamless interoperability across solutions and domains, respects intellectual property, ensures data privacy and creates incentives for all ecosystem stakeholders.
The mobility infrastructure is run-down and requires billions in annual investment. More and more German companies and citizens are complaining about the state of the roads and mobility infrastructure. This leads to economic damage and dangerous situations that could be avoided. Monitoring road conditions is currently a very costly and inefficient process. Data is collected by individual municipalities in isolated systems. A digital twin of the infrastructure and seamless collaboration between stakeholders is still far away. A digital twin can simulate and optimize traffic flows and mobility services in real time. This improves the efficiency and user-friendliness of intermodal journeys.
Digital road condition monitoring
Road conditions can be inspected by any vehicle equipped with a camera. Only a special software is needed that converts images and videos into appropriate labels indicating whether damage is visible, what type of damage it is (e.g. a pothole) and where it is located. A scalable infrastructure and collaboration solution makes the results available to all stakeholders for reuse. This is provided by our use case.
Scalable data services ecosystem for digital twin
The vehicle data collection and road condition monitoring use case offers a scalable digital data services ecosystem in which data providers, software providers, infrastructure providers and consumers work together efficiently to exchange and combine mobility infrastructure data, AI applications for analysis and infrastructure for calculations - from the cloud to edge and IoT solutions. This is the basis for true digital twins that are accessible to all stakeholders. The data services ecosystem is production-ready at the end of the project and offers scalable reference implementations.
Advantages and business opportunities
In the new digital service ecosystem services can be offered for free, on a cost-covering basis or profit-oriented. A fair, competitive market rewards those who deliver the best service quality and at the same time removes friction and reduces overall prices. The market is no longer limited to one domain or geographic region, enabling economies of scale. Stakeholders are free to roam between domains and expand the open market. To ensure smooth data exchange and seamless collaboration between systems and services, it is important to have a clear and uniform understanding of the meaning and content of the data. This is known as semantic interoperability and ensures that data and services can be exchanged in a way that is understandable and consistent for all parties involved.
The detection of road damage by vehicles in the field offers numerous advantages:
Authorities or road construction companies are able to focus on the most urgent road sections and assess and repair damage before it leads to high costs.
The data can be shared with other vehicles and mobility service providers to identify potential hazards, optimize routing and avoid unfavorable routes.
The largest economic gain will be enabled through the economics of scale and the creation of an open ecosystem for all stakeholders under free competition. This leads to significant investments and the development of more efficient software solutions in a competitive market.
Overall, the solution significantly reduces the costs of collecting, providing, finding and analyzing mobility data. As a result, more of the available resources can be allocated to maintain and improve existing infrastructure.
More generally, environmental data that is being collected by vehicles can be used for a multitude of use cases.
Gaia-X 4 Future Mobility family of projects and Gaia-X ecosystem
We use the semantic models developed in Base-X and Gaia-X to support scalable and interoperable solutions across the family of projects and beyond. Using the same building blocks, modular solutions can overcome the limitations of previous fragmented solutions.
The solution is connected to the PLC-AAD project which also works on road condition monitoring and the City of Hamburg and the Urban Data Platform providing road condition data.
The digital data service ecosystem Pontus-X is used to provide scalable and decentralized base services for the use case, such as a federated catalogue, contracting and payment services, the marketplace integration, integration with the Gaia-X Digital Clearing Houses (GXDCH), logging services and an open identity ecosystem integration. Access Control and Compute-to-Data capabilities for IP- and privacy preserving computations are provided by open-source data exchange standards such as Ocean Protocol.
