In partnership with Acciona and the Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda, it’s leading a pilot of a European RDI project that seeks to ensure good road conditions, reduce accidents, optimize interventions and increase the capacity and availability of roads through the digitalization of infrastructures.

Indra will apply augmented and virtual reality at a virtual control center to enable remotely-operated maintenance tasks and a digital twin to allow real-time management of the road equipment. These developments will reinforce Indra’s position at the forefront of smarter and more sustainable mobility, one it’s achieved thanks to solutions that incorporate artificial intelligence and vision, big data, blockchain, C-ITS services and augmented reality into traffic and transportation management

Indra is working on the creation of a digital twin and a virtual control center on section 2 of the A-2, in Guadalajara, among other innovative solutions, within the framework of one of the pilots of the European RDI OMICRON project which aims to improve the maintenance and sustainability of the European road network.

The aim of the project is to develop a smart asset management platform that will help to reduce accidents and maintenance costs, increase the capacity and availability of the road network and improve the efficiency of road interventions.

In the case of the Spanish pilot, led by Indra in partnership with Acciona and the Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda, as the owner of the infrastructure, it is intended to develop a range of technologies to enable the digitalization of roads and improve their inspection and maintenance activities, in order to move towards smarter and more predictive and sustainable maintenance.

For example, through Prointec, its civil engineering subsidiary, in collaboration with other project partners, Indra will create a digital twin of the road, a virtual replica made in the image and likeness of the infrastructure based on BIM methodology to centralize all the information on the highway and road surface, the bridges and tunnels and the lighting and signalling systems. This digital twin will integrate, in real-time, all the information collected on the project’s smart platform, including any sent from the road itself by the maintenance vehicles connected to the infrastructure, thanks to the C-ITS systems and the V2X communications systems deployed in the project.

This digital twin, together with a decision-making support tool, will facilitate the industrialization and automation of certain tasks required for road management which currently have a high physical and labour-intensive component. This will entail a qualitative leap when it comes to carrying out maintenance work and operating roads in as optimal and sustainable a manner as possible.

The A-2 pilot project also includes the development of a decentralized virtual control center, which will enable the operators to access all the information, and interact and operate the highway remotely from anywhere in the world, thus facilitating the maintenance work.

This solution will be particularly important in the event that it is necessary to minimize the presence of professionals due to contingencies preventing them from travelling, and also in the event that they have to deal with an emergency, for example, a fire, in critical and complex infrastructures such as tunnels.

Source: INDRA