MOBI-ROMA tool for mobile road monitoring

MOBI-ROMA - Mobile Observation Methods for Road Maintenance Assessments - was initiated by ERA-NET ROAD II. Improved, affordable and moderate-cost mobile road condition and performance assessment techniques were developed, tested and evaluated, offering new effective tools for monitoring and assessing road conditions in varying climatic conditions. The service is tailored for road maintenance professionals, but provides smarter travel and improved safety also for private transport companies and ordinary road users. A Graphical User Interface is available online on http://mobiroma.eu. The pilot service shows road surface conditions, the strength of the road bed and dangerous slipperiness using Floating Car Data (FCD) coming from the vehicles’ internal sensors through the CAN-bus or simple devices mounted on the vehicle. FCD fleets can be run with reasonable costs if relying on existing road transport systems. Standards for data, low cost of communication, and large fleet of monitoring vehicles would be required for pan-European mobile monitoring network. The remaining accessibility problems to CAN-bus data must be solved. There is very large potential benefit inherent in road user warnings based on mobile monitoring data. A small reduction of accidents (1%) due to improved road condition data can lead to substantial benefits (100 fold) on both national and European scales.