Road wear stands as a pervasive challenge and a significant financial burden in infrastructure upkeep. Detecting and mapping road wear early and in detail can alleviate these costs and simultaneously extend the lifespan of road surfaces. The project team successfully finalised the EGNSS-project ESRIUM (TRL 6) in November 2023, identified necessary technological and standardisation steps for entering into the market and targets this tender as an optimal window-of-opportunity for doing so. The overall objective of ESERCOM-D is to facilitate standardization efforts through the implementation of a demonstrable service (TRL 8), which fosters greener and smarter road usage, optimizes road maintenance, and increases road safety. In doing so, the automation of the complete chain from road condition monitoring to smart decision making will be demonstrated. Moreover, the project seeks to establish, contact and create liaison with key standardization bodies and expand the utilization of EGNSS in the road and automotive industry. The goals emphasize the importance of aligning developments with international industry-accepted certification and standardization schemes. Through comprehensive testing and validation in real-life environments, ESERCOM-D aims to provide proof of concept demonstrators for standardization concepts, ensuring the sustainable impact and widespread acceptance of its outcomes. The project's commitment to transparency, user acceptance assessment, and fostering sustainable impact underscores its excellence in addressing current challenges and pushing the boundaries of the state of the art in road wear assessment and maintenance.

With the aim to reduce workers’ exposure to live traffic and construction machines, increase the availability of the transport network, reduce the cost of repetitive tasks, and increase the safety of road users, InfraROB promotes significant advances in automating, robotising and modularizing the construction, upgrade and maintenance of the road infrastructure. By focussing on the road bed and, particularly, on roads paved with asphalt (the most widely applied type of pavement in Europe, accounting for 90% of all paved roads and highways ), the project will develop autonomous robotized systems/machinery for (i) (re)paving, (ii) repairing cracks/potholes in the road surface, and (iii) line marking. In addition, it will develop (iv) robotized safety systems for workers and road users. It will then develop (v) integrated one-piece precast construction elements for the roadside drainage serving a major degree of modularization in road design and construction/upgrade. In order to cope with optimal road maintenance planning, the project will furthermore upgrade existing Pavement Management Systems (PMS) to use digital twin models of road networks that track changes of their physical counterparts in real time, to give support for maintenance planning based on dynamic predictive modeling and the acquisition of real-time data on pavement conditions. Finally, yet evenly important, to provide for the safe and coordinated deployment of automated road maintenance robots, the project will attempt the integration of Pavement Management System (PMS) and Traffic Management System (TMS) solutions in order to allow for a holistic, integrated management of road infrastructure and traffic over the whole lifespan.

ESRIUM is a multi-national project with the common goal to set up a service to foster greener and smarter road usage, road maintenance, and to increase road safety. The key innovation will be formed by a homogeneous, accurate and recent digital map of road surface damage and road wear. ESRIUM’s core proposition is a data platform, which hosts highly detailed EGNSS-referenced map data of road damage and associated safety risks at centimeter-level resolution. Further addressed as “road wear map”, it will contain unique information, which is of value to multiple stakeholders: road operators will be able to lower the road maintenance effort by optimal planning. Further, road operators will be able to lower road wear and increase traffic safety especially for heavy vehicles. Considering the market introduction of partly automated truck fleets, the precise track of these vehicles can be adjusted by communicating precise routing recommendations in- and cross-lane. Truck fleet operators following these recommendations can receive tolling benefits, and increase the general safety for their vehicle fleet. Especially with the increasing levels of autonomy, systems will utilize infrastructure support to handle the requirements of the automated driving task and additional external requests. In ESRIUM, these opportunities are addressed by utilizing C-ITS infrastructure and EGNSS based localization in planning the trajectories of such automated vehicles. Key to the ESRIUM innovation is a precision localization service, which provides reliable locatization information of road damages and of the vehicles using the roads. Considering a European-level business-case, only Galileo may provide such a service in homogeneous quality, even at very remote locations on the European continent.

FUTURE-HORIZON will, with various actions clustered in five WPs, support ERTRAC, future Horizon Europe partnerships and the European Commission in identifying future research needs for upcoming R&I programmes to further facilitate a sustainable and efficient road transport system in Europe, while also extensively fostering international cooperation. By doing an elaborate analysis of the first Horizon Europe calls and matching these topics with the ERTRAC roadmaps in WP1 future research priorities and current research gaps will be identified. The regular update of ERTRAC roadmaps in the case of need is a continuous task that will also be done within WP1. A link to the predecessor project FUTURE-RADAR will be established, deepening further the understanding of the European research landscape, linking the findings to roadmaps, partnerships, projects, literature and patents. The purpose of WP2 will be the exploration of opportunities for complementing the strategic planning of the well-established RTR ecosystem in Europe by analyses, benchmark and collaboration with other relevant world regions, focusing predominantly on North and South America, Asia and Africa. First RTR strategies in established markets will be mapped and then compared to European RTR strategies. From these findings targets, programmes and achievements will be derived to complement the ERTRAC roadmaps, creating an international perspective for them. In WP3 the focus will mainly lie on emerging economies. The implementation actions will provide platforms to develop capacities and capabilities to develop, implement and operate innovative sustainable mobility solutions. Partnerships among transport stakeholders across partner and European countries will be fostered and a catalogue of implementation concepts for sustainable mobility will be developed and fed back to ERTRAC. Dissemination, focusing on ERTRAC visibility and publications, will be done in WP4. Project coordination will be done in WP5.

INFRAMIX, totally aligned with the work programme, is preparing the road infrastructure to support the transition period and the coexistence of conventional and automated vehicles. Its main target is to design, upgrade, adapt and test both physical and digital elements of the road infrastructure, ensuring an uninterrupted, predictable, safe and efficient traffic. To meet this high level objective INFRAMIX is working on different technologies. It starts with the use of mature simulation tools adapted to the peculiarities of automated vehicles and develops new methods for traffic flow modelling, to study the traffic-level influence of different levels of automated vehicles in different penetration rates. It also implements relevant traffic estimation and control algorithms dynamically adapted to the current situation. Then it goes up to propose minimum, targeted and affordable adaptations on elements of the road infrastructure, either physical or digital or a combination of them. This work includes ways of informing all types of vehicles about the control commands issued by the road operator and the proposal of new kind of visual and electronic signals for the needs of mixed scenarios. The outcomes will be assessed via simulation and in real stretches of advanced highways. Key aspects considered throughout the project will be to ensure that the proposed adaptations will not jeopardize safety, quality of service, efficiency and will be appreciated by the users. To achieve its objectives INFRAMIX selects a bottom-up approach. Instead of working in generic solutions with questionable impact, it builds on three specific high value (in terms of importance for traffic efficiency and safety) traffic scenarios, namely “dynamic lane assignment”, “roadworks zones” and “bottlenecks”. Although INFRAMIX is targeting mainly highways (expected to be the initial hosts of such mixed traffic) its key results can be easily transferred to urban roads.