Space technologies for better roads

Last week Valerann announced it was awarded together with Excelerate Technologies a €1.2M match-funded project by the European Space Agency. The project, dubbed ITS Equant, was designed to introduce specific space and satellite technologies to the Traffic Management and Intelligent Transportation Systems industries. Throughout the project Valerann will work with Excelerate, and with the support of the Satellite Applications Catapult, to integrate satellite communication, GPS RTK hardware, and geo-spatial based algorithms into the Valerann Smart Road System. In this blog we will cover some of the benefits that space technologies can bring to the traffic management industry, which led Valerann to plan and pursue this project.

Connectivity coverage

• Connectivity is a prerequisite for any type of traffic management or ITS solution today, just as it is for many future mobility applications. Road operators invest ±€100K / KM on connectivity solutions to make sure their roads have the data bandwidth they need today and in the future. This approach is vital for high-capacity urban serving motorways, where vehicle volume (which drives both RoI for these investments and required bandwidth to serve the road) is very high.
• However, the majority of our roads have neither the resources nor the traffic volumes to enable and justify spending millions of dollars in fibre optic communications. Some of these roads can fall back onto cellular technology. With 5G supposedly around the corner, such wireless connectivity may not fall too short of the bandwidth / vehicle that fibre offers to busier roads. Unfortunately, many roads will not have 5G for the foreseeable future. Indeed, many roads do not even have stable 4G or any cellular coverage. The National Infrastructure Commission recently released a report that concluded that 36% of highways in the UK do not have full 4G cover and many such roads have no cover at all.
• These roads and their users can still benefit greatly from data connectivity services: traffic would be safer, congestion could be managed, and future connected and autonomous vehicles could operate more efficiently. These are the first roads that would benefit from satellite enabled ITS. Satellite connectivity could connect control centres and emergency responders to sensors in the field and data from vehicles to learn of risks and incidents that must be managed in real time. Likewise, down the road, such connectivity could be leveraged to inform connected vehicles of events downstream that would otherwise remain unknown until the last moment.

Accurate installations for better integration -

• Traffic sensors today are mostly installed along the road, according to either specific key points of interest (e.g., intersections, on/off ramps, toll plazas) or along a linear demarcation system (mile marker 16.3). The focus of these sensors has been to understand what is happening at that specific location, and often does not seek to provide insight from the comparative data of two consecutive sensors. As such, the precise GPS position of sensors is usually unrecorded. For events occurring within sensing distance of the sensor, that is not an issue. However, it reduces the ability to relate a data set from one sensor to that coming from another, even if the operator wanted to do so after the installation. This reduced ability to relate and integrate data sets costs the road operator in valuable use cases unleveraged. Operators can assess the speed of a car going along one sensor, but not re-identify that vehicle over consecutive sensors.
• Once accurate GPS positioning of all sensors is captured, any data from those sensors also has the same GPS location and time stamp. This makes it easier to relate one data set to another. For example, once we know that two sensors are exactly 512 meters away one from another, we can aspire to re-identify vehicles passing between them. So, if a light vehicle passes over one first sensor in lane 1 at 17:02.13 at 108.4 km/h will be re-identified under a camera 512 meters away at 17:02.30. Such re-identification enables the operator to explore many new use cases such as reducing revenue leakage from toll roads, improving incident detection, and anticipating congestion to improve pricing. Of course, re-identification can be attempted without absolute locations of all data assets, but it is unlikely to reach the operational reliability required for decision making.

Valerann's installation tool in use in past deployments will include GPS-RTK to ensure each sensor is geo accurate.Seamless interface

• While linear measurement systems (e.g., mile markers) have their shortcomings, they are very easy to work with for professional users such as control centre operatives and patrol officers. If an event happens in mile market 12.3, it can be easily located by all those who are intimately familiar with the asset and are actively aware of their own location. However, this system has its shortcomings. First of all, it is prone to human error. Drivers reporting an incident (still the largest source of incident alerts on motorways) will often not know the precise location, resulting with mistakenly deployed resources. Looking to the future, this will become even more pronounced. Connected vehicles, navigation apps, autonomous systems, and many more technologies do not use linear systems. Instead, they rely on GPS-based systems. Integrating satellite communications and anchoring all data sources using GPS will allow traffic management systems to provide valuable data and alerts of incidents directly to those systems, by anchoring them in digital maps.

A two-way street

• Our journeys could improve significantly once traffic management systems begin to leverage satellite and space technologies. Similarly, though, the traffic management industry could add value to other systems that rely solely on GPS and similar technologies. For example, today many navigation systems that rely on GPS struggle to accurately place themselves in critical points along a journey. Urban canyons, tunnels, on/off ramps, and interchanges all present high-risk challenges to the system’s ability to understand its location and make timely decisions on that basis. In contrast, infrastructure-based systems have an absolute grounding in a specific location. If a vehicle detection system has sensed a specific vehicle on an on-ramp, that confirms the vehicle is indeed there, rather than on the road on the bridge just above. As the traffic management industry leverages the benefits of space technologies, it will be able to support and provide complimentary data to other systems that also leverage these technologies.

Valerann is excited to launch ITS-Equant. The project will bring to the traffic management market new capabilities that leverage the many benefits of space and satellite technologies. Better connectivity, improved integrations with existing traffic management systems, and an ability to interface with external systems are some of the key benefits of this new approach. Similarly, the assimilation of space technologies into traffic management systems will enable road operators to support other systems that also rely on space technologies, by offering complimentary services and data.