Sacyr Maintenance has won the AXA Innovation and Development Award in Road Safety, in the 14th edition of the “Ponle Freno” Awards, organized by Atresmedia, for its Sacyr InRoad project.
This initiative is based on an Artificial Intelligence technology developed to continually monitor key maintenance indicators and indexes that help assess the state of roads.
“Automatic inspection methods are very useful to improve the efficiency of auscultations. With InRoad, we substantially increase the frequency with which we register data to learn more about the problems and their evolution”, explains Juan Manuel Sánchez, Technical Director of Sacyr Maintenance, who collected the award yesterday at the gala.
“This award is a recognition of the work of the entire maintenance team so that our roads under a P3 project are in perfect condition. With our commitment to talent, sustainability and innovation we make it so that projects such as InRoad improve the quality of life of citizens and we reduce the possibility of accidents happening for that reason”, says Raquel Calderón, General Manager of Sacyr Maintenance. “Sacyr InRoad entails an increase in quality, comfort and safety on the road”, she stresses.
Regularly tending to wear signs on the road does not only offer safety advantages, but it is also three times less expensive than waiting to need larger repairs.
Using Sacyr InRoad allows to better plan and execute low-cost measures to optimize road maintenance and the safety of users. “This is a technology-based solution that advances our already existing analysis and road control techniques”, affirms Sánchez.
As for the working process, the system is based on obtaining data, smart processing and graphic representation. This way, we can make the evolution and degradation predictive analysis.
To make the most of the data we have a management platform that incorporates all the data viewing mechanisms, algorithm integration and monitoring tools necessary to supervise traceability.
The integration of sensors with smart algorithms allows us to create data bases and wear models that improve the structural analysis behavior and make decision making easier.
With this project, brought to life in collaboration with the Centro Tecnológico de Castilla y León (ITCL), we have increased service quality and enhanced our commitment to the environment and safety.
Some of the advantages of InRoad are:
- Low-cost solution: implementation, replacement of sensorica, scalability.
- Greater frequency of data obtention: evolution analysis and prediction,
- Optimization of resources: more efficient programming, cost/benefit análisis.
- Greater structural knowledge: digitization of all the information.
Less accidents and CO2
A good condition is key to road safety, as it reduces the variables that can cause accidents and it considerably reduces their mobility in case they do happen.
Roads in bad condition causes wear and damage and accidents that compromise travel safety. 30% of road accidents happen due to roads in bad condition, according to the data by the Fiscalía de Seguridad Vial (Road Safety Office) of the Prosecution Ministry.
Furthermore, a good condition of the road network could bring a 9% reduction of CO2 emissions of light vehicles, and 6% in the case of heavy vehicles, according to a report by the AEC (Asociación Española de la Carretera).
Having a flat surface with enough rolling capacity reduces fuel consumption between 3% to 6%.
This report estimates that lack of maintenance is the cause of at least 25 million tons more of CO2 in the past decade.
