Project Summary

We want to improve the maintenance and operation of highways through the development of a cloud-based digital twins (DTs) platform for highways by a) surveying highways using data captured from Mercedes-Benz (MB) passenger vehicles and b) building a DT platform that enables the building of applications to leverage roads-related data to improve the surveying, maintenance and operation of roads. We will use 40km of roads data, provided to us by National Highways(NH), and information provided by MB, to build a demo version of the platform, and give API access to NH, academics and supply chain partners of NH to test the technical and commercial feasibility of DTs in infrastructure assets.

Project Achievements

We conducted a technical feasibility study, a commercial viability study, multiple customer interviews and stakeholder engagements. We developed a product that can connect to vehicles in real time, use machine learning to learn facts about the highway, and transmit this information back to the road authority. To achieve this, we had to produce innovations around how data is collected and processed from passenger vehicles at a large scale and in real time and machine learning models to derive insights from them at a large scale. We demonstrated the solution in a relevant environment.

Conclusions

We tested the feasibility of collecting data from vehicles and using them to make maintenance decisions about highways. The concept was proven successfully and demonstrated in a relevant environment. This sparked commercial and development interest from multiple parties, including National Highways, Costain, other contractors, the DfT and local authorities. There is strong evidence that the solution will get adopted.

Next Steps

The next steps in terms of technical development require us to raise further funds and reinvest in the product. We have produced a feature roadmap with what we need to build to deploy the system in a relevant environment. To raise these funds, we are looking at private and public sources. We are in discussions to deploy this solution operationally in a real asset (Area 14), and then scale horizontally throughout the country. Post national deployment, we will seek to export the solution to other geographies. Additionally, we are looking to create an open-source dataset with pothole and maintenance data for the whole of the UK, with aggregated information, and give access for free to academics, researchers and the government for research purposes. We are exploring options to fund this. TRIG has had a dramatically positive effect in developing, executing and actioning on this project. Without TRIG, we would have been unable to explore this use-case at such a significant depth.