HAIRoad Project

Today, the condition of the roads in Flanders is monitored through labor-intensive and costly human inspection. To help solve this challenge and automate road inspection, the project partners will leverage smart sensors and hybrid Artificial Intelligence (AI). They envisage that through their innovations, road inspection can be done faster, and maintenance can be planned earlier. This should lead to roads which have fewer bumps, are less noisy, and are generally safer. 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. 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.