HAIRoad

A dense network, challenging to maintain

Flanders has one of the densest and heavily used road networks in the world, a network that is challenging to maintain and upgrade. As a result, up to 30% of municipality budgets are spent on mobility and road infrastructure.

The standard approach to map the state of the municipal road network is the one currently set forward by the Belgian Road Research Centre (BRRC). It is mainly based on visual inspection. But due to the high costs and limited budgets, less than 5% of municipalities have adopted it. Most will use an ad-hoc approach, often working more reactively instead of preventive. So there is a clear need for an innovative approach that is more cost-effective.

Leveraging AI and sensors

With its highly complementary group of research and industrial partners, HAIRoad wants to improve the state of the art and the current BRRC approach, by adding automated data collection and interpretation. A second goal is to provide more adequate forecasts of road conditions, allowing for maintenance recommendations that correctly weigh the costs and benefits. A key element of HAIRoad’s plan is to leverage smart sensors for data collection and hybrid AI for data interpretation and forecasting.

Research goals and outcomes
HAIRoad’s partners will work on the following innovations and goals:

• Automate the acquisition of the indicators of the BRRC approach and look to develop a number of new indicators. It may, for example, be possible to monitor roads also with regards to water management and garbage.
• Improve the accuracy of indicators through data fusion of the input of various types of sensors.
• Use hybrid AI to incorporate the degradation models of the BRRC methodology in the new forecasting model.
• Develop a robust data pipeline that can facilitate the deployment and updation of the AI prediction model

The project’s innovations will be integrated in two demonstrators: one at the Port of Antwerp to validate the more technical aspects, and one at the municipality level to validate the market potential.

“HAIRoad will innovate road maintenance in Flanders through a combination of automated monitoring, new indicators, sensor fusion with heterogeneous sensors, and artificial intelligence.”