15 Mar Final workshop of PAV_DT

Last Tuesday, 8th March, the final workshop of PAV_DT, led by BECSA, took place at the European Commission headquarters in Madrid.

On the morning of Tuesday, 8th March, at the headquarters of the European Commission in Madrid, the last workshop of the PAV-DT project was held. BECSA and the rest of the consortium, Applus, MINDS & SPARKS, Mirco Sensor, and UPV, presented the project to more than 30 potential clients from local, regional and national administrations.

Charo Cornjero, Technical Director of Directorate General for Roads of the Ministry of Transport, and Lucas Gonzalez, Deputy Director of the Representation and Head of Policy Analysis of the European Commission in Spain, opened this fourth last workshop on the PAV-DT project.

During the workshop, the different consortium members that worked on PAV_DT explained the solution to all the assistance: Francisco José Vea Folch, Innovation and New Technologies Director at BECSA, spoke about the project’s genesis; Maximilian Eckardt from Micro Sensor explained how the hardware works that enables PAV_DT to operate; Damir Haskovic, Project Director and researcher at MINDS & SPARKS GmbH, explained how the visualisation platform works; Pedro Aliseda, Technical Director of Road Management at APPLUS, highlighted that PAV_DT is available as product as a service; and finally, Laura Andrés and Miriam Labrado from Universitat Politècnica de València gave a demonstration of product operation.

As relevant people from the innovation area participated in this workshop, Jorge del Pozo from CDTI (Development of Industrial Technology Centre) reviewed the role of this entity in different research projects related to paving managed by this state entity. Del Pozo highlighted the paving and auscultation projects supported by CDTI, which are of high quality and have a tremendous national reach.

Juan José Potti, President of EAPA (European Asphalt Association), reflected on Asphalt 4.0, the new paradigm representing how asphalt needs to adapt to the new electric vehicle’s models. He also reviewed the different requirements that asphalt must meet throughout the asphalting process in order to move towards Asphalt 4.0.

At different moments during the workshop, networking spaces were organised between the representatives of the companies in the consortium and attendees, who were very interested in the solution that the PAV_DT project brings to the care of the roads for the different administrations.

The PAV_DT project started in May 2019 and will be completed in April 2022. These three years have enabled the development of a high-precision, cost-effective and easy-to-implement road monitoring system.

During the project, work was carried out to define the system requirements, followed by the development of the hardware and software to determine the IRI and the pavement defects. For a more accessible and more intuitive data analysis, a visualisation platform has been developed to manage the data collected by the vehicles. In addition, the consortium has developed a neural network that, after its training period, will be able to predict the IRI at one, two and three years.

In order to verify the effectiveness of this prototype, a test campaign is currently underway, including the installation in vehicles of various road administrations so that they can test it and contribute to its improvement. Thanks to these tests, the operational plan will be finalized, and once the project is completed, the consortium will be able to market the solution.