Delegates at this year’s Asecap Days conference were told that the sector is collecting vast amounts of valuable data, but not doing anything valuable with it. “There must be a better way,” said Emil Sylvester Ramos, chief executive and co-founder of the IRIS R&D Group, based in Canada.
Speaker after speaker returned to the theme of getting more out of the data. Ramos talked about his company’s irisGO software … a platform that has the ability to collect data automatically then transmit the captured data to administrators using the irisCITY cloud reporting platform. The resulting data flow includes integration with existing customer data platforms and allows administrators to visualise problems and make data-driven decisions based on the need and location.
Ramos wants to see the industry adopt solutions like this to make faster high-quality decisions … “whether it’s building better roads, finding preventive maintenance opportunities or creating asset inventories”.
Emiliano Di Marino, IT project manager of Autostrade per l’italia, told the 350 delegates that because they represent most of Europe’s biggest toll-road operators, they are sitting on “data lakes [that can]…drive insights and predictions” to investigate threats, monitor systems and improve performance.
He recommended creating digital inventories and the full digitisation of inspection processes, based on a modular and scalable platform, to enable better and more efficient health monitoring of infrastructure. In other words, put a centralised asset management and infrastructure monitoring platform to make timely and business-critical decisions.
Marzia Malavisi, head of structural monitoring at MOVYON, agreed, adding that digital twins and AI (artificial intelligence) are the way forward. “Create a high-resolution digital twin [of the bridge] using multi-resolution technology,” she said. Then “perform linear and aerial measurements, insert notes directly on the 3D structure and visualise an initial set of defects suggested by an artificial intelligence system”.
She urged the use of the resulting data to reimagine bridge inspections to bring the bridge into the office in order to carry out inspections on screen including hard-to-reach bridge components. Is possible to apply AI to support inspectors and observe and measure the evolution of defects over time. This will mean a limited impact on highway traffic flow and a higher level of security.
Think safety
There are also huge strategic and operational wins if big data and AI are used to speed up emergency response times and reduce fatalities, said Michael Vardi, co-founder and chief business officer of Valerann. He said that his company’s Real-time Fusion Engine consumes, analyses and organises data from integrated sources by harnessing AI, machine learning and big data technologies. The result is a rich, accurate picture of the road, its traffic, infrastructure and conditions, including the most relevant disruptions and safety incidents.
Jacob Rainbow, Valerann's technology lead for data fusion, added that the company’s Lanternn platform can help road operators use AI-driven risk prediction to improve road safety. The technology predicts risk, Rainbow told the conference, drawing “immediate insights from millions of historical incidents” and fusing it together in “plain English”.
Lanternn then puts these feeds into context, using traffic flow and weather reports and roadside cameras before “reducing the noise” that big data and information overload can impose. The system uses feedback from apps like Waze, for instance, and aims for 93% compression to mitigate alert fatigue, he added. There is also a “fuzzy logic fusion engine” which allows infinite customisation.
The end result, according to one of the company’s customers, has been an 88% improvement in response relevance, a 25% improvement in response times and a 40% reduction in the number of accidents. Also, 95% incident alerts on Lanternn are raised with the operator within five minutes of happening.
How tomorrow’s road infrastructure will be financed was a major topic at the event. Expect road user charging – RUC - and toll collection revenues to be merged into one platform, but with differentiated billing, said Lubor Lancos, solution consultant at Kapsch TrafficCom. RUC will be collected from all vehicles [with an alternative propulsion] for any road they use, he said. This will be a fuel excise duty replacement and “tolls will be collected on strategic roads determined by the road authorities”.
More clean air zones, low emission zones and congestion charging are coming and will be delivered on the same technology platform. But government’s will need to take the people with them. Lubor said that RUC collection should be revenue-neutral and not increase the tax burden on individual citizens. “All fees must be acceptable and thoroughly explained to the public,” otherwise we should get ready for rejection and protest.
It will also be important to keep your revenue streams separate, said Christophe Boutin, executive director of ASFA, the French Association of Toll Motorway Companies. We need to decide if the Eurovignette is our friend or our foe, he told the conference.
According to the European Environment Agency, the Eurovignette “a fixed annual charge for heavy vehicles calculated in accordance with the damage caused to the environment and road infrastructure, necessary for using the roads in European Union countries that do not levy tolls on motorways”. Vignettes are also “a form of road pricing imposed on vehicles, usually in addition to their compulsory road tax fees, based on a period of time the vehicle may use the road, instead of road tolls that are based on distance travelled”.
Boutin is also worried about road users being hit with a double whammy, generating anger and disobedience. Directive 2022/362, on toll tariffs, says that the infrastructure charge for heavy-duty vehicles is based on the principle of the recovery of infrastructure costs. The weighted average infrastructure charge for heavy-duty vehicles shall be related to the construction costs and the costs of operating, maintaining and developing the infrastructure network concerned. The weighted average infrastructure charge may also include a return on capital and/or a profit margin based on market conditions.
However, the reality, noted Boutin, is that external cost charges may be introduced on top of tariffs but [they] must not fund infrastructure. A combination of road user charging and toll fees seems unlikely when both are needed, but road user charging should compensate for the disappearance of the gas/fuel tax and tolls should be used for infrastructure funding.
The bottom line
“Toll systems have evolved from manual, to mechanical and electrical, to digital and now to the smart IoTT [Internet of Transport Things],” explained John Davis, commercial director at ViaPlus Europe, a Vinci Highways company and which specialises in revenue and service management solutions for the transport sector. “But their core function remains unchanged: to optimise traffic and assure revenues.”
It remains all about the customer. “There has to be a proven correlation between compliance and quality customer service,” said Davis “Customer experience levels are crucial to both traffic and revenue.”
In the early phases of tolling evolution there was a “user-pays” focus, with the monies raised used to finance infrastructure, according to Davis. “The concept of ‘customers’ was not on the radar. Then there was a recognition that quality customer service is crucial to revenue realisation. Now it is about who owns the customer.
Get going now
Meanwhile, a recent report from consultancy McKinsey outlines how properly managing, controlling and analysing data properly is essential to survival. Only a fraction of data from connected devices is ingested, processed, queried and analysed in real time due to the limits of legacy technology structures, the challenges of adopting more modern architectural elements and the high computational demands of intensive, real-time processing. Companies often must choose between speed and computational intensity, which can delay more sophisticated analyses and inhibit the implementation of real-time use cases.
How data is generated, processed, analysed and visualised for end users is dramatically transformed by new and more ubiquitous technologies. These include kappa or lambda architectures for real-time analysis, leading to faster and more powerful insights. Even the most sophisticated advanced analytics are reasonably available to all organisations as the cost of cloud computing continues to decline and more powerful ‘in-memory’ data tools come online, for example, Redis and Memcached.
Data as a product
An organisation’s data function, if one exists outside of IT, manages data using top-down standards, rules, and controls. Data often has no true ‘owner’ ensuring it’s updated and ready for use in various ways. Data sets are also stored - sometimes in duplication - across sprawling, siloed and often costly environments. This makes it difficult for users within an organisation, such as data scientists who are looking for data to build analytics models, to quickly find, access and integrate the data they need.
But by 2025, data assets will be organised and supported as products, regardless of whether they’re used by internal teams or external customers. These data products have dedicated teams, or ‘squads’, aligned against them to embed data security, evolve data engineering (for example, to transform data or continuously integrate new sources of data), and implement self-service access and analytics tools.
