Pilot 6: EUROADMAP
Leaders:
WP2, WP3, WP4, WP6, Rene Kelpin (DLR), Pekka Leviäkangas (VTT), Jörg Dubbert (Pöyry)
Description:
European road weather databases using sponsor-based business model.
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The pilot is aimed at the very heterogeneous field of given road weather data in Europe. The availability of road weather data ranges from well described, free available and intensively applied data sets in Scandinavia or Germany to non existent data sets in some east-European countries.
While for Scandinavian countries as Finland and Sweden a reliable knowledge of the road conditions derived from road weather information is very important not only in the winter season, the necessity for daily road weather information in central and south European countries seems to be negligible. However, not only northern European countries may increase road safety by using accurate and actual road weather information. Also for instance strong wind regions as the Croatian east-Adriatic coast or alpine regions in the Alp’s countries could use road weather information for forecasting road conditions more intensively. There are multiple areas in Europe that have exceptional weather conditions that need to be taken into account by road users.
First of all the pilot needs a thorough European wide investigation of available road weather data sets, their formats, and utilizations. Measurement devices and communication technologies have to be considered as well as the quality and reliability of measured weather data. For this purpose a contribution of all ROADIDEA project members is needed. The ROADIDEA WP2 data source investigation methodology can be adapted and used for this first step of the pilot implementation. By and large the necessary data is there, at least for problematic regions but the problem is with integration and distribution. For example, the TEMPO-programme has reported a substantial increase in coverage of traveller information services (traffic situation via internet, VMS, RDS-TMC) in Europe during the recent years .
In order to give a European wide overview of existing road weather data a general format has to be designed, which allows storing all data sets in one EUROADMAP data base. This overview is to be done on a web site, which accesses the mentioned data base and which could be use as a trading platform as well.
In order to carry this out, a business case need to be pointed out so that wide-coverage distributors, such as BBC and similar global information service enterprises could work as integrators. This is already today done for weather information services and a similar business case needs to be addressed.
A similar approach was followed in the EU research project Track&Trade, in which vehicle probe data from taxi fleets (FCD) was investigated, visualized on a web site in traffic state maps and traded directly. A business model has been developed which included different aggregation levels of the raw data and different billing models accordingly.
The EUROADMAP pilot might follow the Track&Trade example directly.
A special challenge in case of EUROADMAP is the merging of overlapping road weather data sets with inconsistent attributes and values, i.e. coverage overlappings of two neighbour weather stations with different formats at inner-European borders.
For the project run time of ROADIDEA a visualization of available road weather data sets all over Europe would be reasonable. This includes the data set investigation, a format consideration, a data base implementation as well as the visualization on a web site.
The web site could link to existing web applications (DESTIA) based on the visualized road weather data sets.
Big information services companies should be contacted and the business case should be inquired and made explicit. A demonstration should be interesting to them.
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Data Needs
During the ROADIDEA data source investigation a couple of road weather data as well as grid weather data was identified and described. This data is needed from the ROADIDEA platform. As described above a further investigation of available road weather data has to be performed. These data sets are to be stored in the ROADIDEA data base as well and are to be provided for the EUROADMAP pilot, too.
In practice, there needs to be an access to national road authorities’ (or their service providers’) road weather data bases and integrate this information on digital map information.
Technical approach
The following technical components are needed for the pilot:
- data base
- web server with data base and map interfaces
Only standardized communication channels are to be used. Data base accesses using SQL commands. The web site communication (only visualization) is to be established via the HTTP protocol.
It is recommended to use the ROADIDEA platform (includes at least a data base as well as a web server) for this pilot.
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Geographical scope
The geographical scope could be
- ‘bilateral’ between selected two countries on specific road stretches
- a corridor–specific, e.g. Trans-Alpine routes, or Adriatic coastal corridor or based on Euro-regional division as in EasyWay project.
Other necessary steps
For demonstration purpose, the access to road weather data, which is a combination of road data from road authorities and weather data available now globe-wide, would be sufficient.
For real business case, there must be the ‘integrator’ and ‘distributor’ of road weather information. For professional services, such as drivers of large transport companies, the companies themselves could act as a client to integrators and distributors who in turn could be SME service providers, targeting their services to dedicated segments of professional users that have willingness to pay for the services.
In consumer market, i.e. the ordinary road users in their passenger cars, the distributors and integrators must be larger entities, precisely as it is today for global weather information provision. This is done for free just because it provides an access to offer these consumers other types of services.
DISCUSSION AREA: