Valerann

Last year, Chile’s Costa Arauco motorway gained a state-of-the-art advanced traffic monitoring system (ATMS) that significantly improved its network oversight and safety.

And it was all deployed remotely in a few weeks by engineers working from London and Tel Aviv.

The solution is from Valerann, an ITS Software as a Service (SaaS) company specialising in artificial intelligence (AI), big data and data fusion technology. It points the way to a future in which ITS systems are supplied remotely over the cloud, and operate smartly by leveraging a mix of hardware and third-party data feeds. It gives operators new AI-enhanced automated capabilities to swiftly spot, respond to and even anticipate and so minimise or prevent incidents entirely.

In partnership with Openvia Mobility, the Chilean deployment integrated nine cameras for road monitoring, 15 cameras located across three toll areas and eight response operation vehicles, and is one of several Valerann has completed in the region.

Another notable implementation – again, with Openvia - is along Costa Rica’s Ruta 27, which serves as a testbed for innovation in the Caribbean region. The 76.8 km motorway connecting the capital, San Jose, and Caldera, the busiest sea port at the Pacific coast, carries 100,000 vehicles per day.

The road, with 33 mobile and 22 fixed cameras, has a complex terrain with variable width between two to four lanes (each direction) and goes through mountains and valleys. As the road is located in the tropics it is subjected to fog, heat and tropical rains.

Such challenging environments make Latin America a promising and fast-growing market for the company, according to Matthew Cooper, the company’s vice president for market development. *(Editor's note: Since this interview, Matthew Cooper has left the company and is replaced by John Fagan, CRO).*

“These are very safety-conscious markets with some of the highest accident rates in Latin America," Cooper said. "They take this very seriously. They know their priories and where to invest. They are knowledgeable, but they are handicapped by environment and funding.

This is good for Valerann, he says. “Remote deployment to cloud makes it easier for them to get access to proper ITS systems and third-party data sources. We give them powerful tools they could not leverage before engaging with us.”

Operators in emerging economies with limited budgets now have the potential to leapfrog the functionality of ITS systems from advanced economies.

Valerann’s solution, called Lanternn, offers a number of innovative features. The system offers automated incident detection, helping operators detect where a tricky situation may be coming up and enabling them to get ahead of incidents to mitigate risk. This could include the use of variable message signs, external data sources such as Waze and TomTom, or an alert being sent to nearby patrol cars.

A differentiating feature of Lanternn is its ability to fuse data sources and rapidly analyse them in aggregate, says Cooper: “On other deployments it is incumbent on the operator to look at and analyse each individual data source. Even a modest deployment could have many cameras and lots of alerts from third-party systems and the operator has to then sift through those alerts. We take all those data posts and analyse them in real time to work out what’s going on.”

# ***“It reduces the barriers to entry for road authorities without big budgets to invest and we have a much faster time to value”***

The use of AI is an important component here. Valerann’s platform is able to model the position, speed and classification of vehicles in real-time, to intelligently detect and validate events on the road and to predict times and locations with an elevated accident risk.

It uses machine vision to identify both static and moving objects, weather and light conditions and to automatically verify alerts reported from open and floating-car sources. It also uses natural language processing (NLP) to make sense of social media feeds.

The alert system works via thresholds that identify signals which fit the profile of an incident by comparing various data sources and corroborating them. “Once we have that confidence, we can send an alert to the operator,” explains Cooper. “We eliminate blind spots so we have a clear understanding of what’s going on. It’s very valuable.”

This process generates alerts that afford operators a high degree of their veracity while also offering steps to take to resolve the situation. “Those anticipatory capabilities have not been available before even in the most robust ITS systems,” claims Cooper.

Over time operators can also improve the performance of the solution by refining the variables that are most relevant to them based on their own feedback and experiences. This serves to improve the corroborating evidence that gives them ever-greater confidence in their responses to incoming incident data.

Lanternn’s ability to connect with third-party data sources offering data on speed, volume or occupancy has a further benefit in that it can reduce or even eliminate the need to invest in further infrastructure such as radars and detector loops, obviating the need to procure, install, maintain, and replace such devices.

Cooper points out the value of such a feature to any operator. Given the high cost of legacy ITS infrastructure there, blind spots are almost inevitable even in well-equipped road networks. “You can’t cover every foot of network. We provide road operators with 100% coverage of the network but leveraging both third-party and legacy infrastructure,” Cooper adds.

Operators can also use the solution to analyse the network data over time and in places where there are frequent near-misses or crashes in locations with no detector or camera. Armed with such insights, they can then opt to upgrade blackspot areas with hardware for further safety.

Safety, security and convenience for operational staff is a further benefit. The Costa Arauco deployment in Chile, for example, is on a remote road in a low population area that makes it challenging to attend to infrastructure there. Vehicles travel at high speeds, engineers must cover large distances and equipment is prone to looting. Minimising the need to install hardware here is a clear benefit.

Operating as a SaaS system offers further benefits over legacy systems. There are huge barriers to entry to deploying ITS functionality - devices and detectors and also ITS systems – in emerging economies.

The SaaS model requires no up-front investment and fees are proportional to the compute power required and remote deployment offers further benefits. “Our cloud model and SaaS pricing structure enable these road network operators to have access to a system like ours at a price that does not require significant up-front expense,” says Cooper

Remote deployment (at the customer’s discretion) entails lower costs and faster deployments with less investment in system IT infrastructure (such as servers) and IT management overhead (including dealing with firewalls, for example) compared with established solutions. Testing can also be conducted remotely.

The time savings are significant. Implementation can be completed in as little as two months compared to more than a year to configure, test and hand over, as is the established norm. “It reduces the barriers to entry for road authorities without big budgets to invest and we have a much faster time to value,” says Cooper.

The third-party data sources are also available by subscription, further reducing adoption costs as operators can pay only for what they need, as they need it.

A good example of the practical safety value of such a system is at high-risk, largely cash-based toll booths that are still common in emerging economies. “Leveraging third-party data sources helps them understand what is going on in those parts of network that they could not before and they are not locked out by the high costs they would have to incur,” Cooper suggests.

Faster and more responsive traffic management is of enormous value. Valerann claims its system is able to identify incidents 25% faster compared to the period prior to its deployment, a valuable improvement given the importance of responding appropriately within as short a time as possible to prevent the risk of secondary accidents happening. “We know it is driving value and helping them save lives,” Cooper says. “The number of incidents that get identified has doubled for our customers. Their level of awareness to what has been happening has increased and they are now able to increase safety across the entire road network as opposed to particular spots where they have legacy ITS devices.”

But the solution is also being deployed by operators in advanced economies who are also benefiting from the gaps it can fill even in well-equipped networks. This is very much the next generation of intelligent systems, which offers what other advanced systems have struggled to achieve.

Cooper cites the example of the Australian state of Victoria, which invested significantly in automated detection but struggled to gain reliable outputs from the system.

“Even the most robust deployments will have blind spots,” says Cooper. “We enable them to know where to put the next bits of infrastructure and for those who have not invested as much, a platform like ours enables them to get up to speed more quickly. An agency or an operator which has not deployed cameras can use third-party data sources to give them the coverage to understand what is happening. We show them where they can make their first investment. Whether we are talking to someone looking to deploy their next camera or their next 100, there is still value in what we offer.”

https://www.itsinternational.com/its1/its4/its5/its7/feature/future-its-remote-says-valerann

We are “collecting vast amounts of valuable data, but not doing anything valuable with it,” delegates at this year’s Asecap Days conference were told. “There must be a better way,” said Emil Sylvester Ramos, CEO and co-founder of the Iris R&D Group.

Speaker after speaker at the event in Istanbul returned to the theme of getting more out of the data that is being collected by the world’s leading highway operators. A huge profit opportunity is being overlooked.

Ramos talked about his company’s IrisGo platform, which can collect data automatically then transmit it to administrators utilising the IrisCity cloud reporting platform.

The resulting data flow includes integration with existing customer data platforms and allows administrators “to visualise and make data-driven decisions based on the need and location”.

Ramos wants to see the industry adopt solutions like this to make faster high-quality decisions, “whether it’s building better roads, finding preventive maintenance opportunities or creating asset inventories.” The benefits that will flow are enormous.

It was a theme echoed by Emiliano Di Marino, IT project manager of Autostrade per l’italia. “Make better decisions using a data-driven approach,” he also told Asecap’s 350 delegates from 20 different countries.

Because they represent most of Europe’s biggest toll road operators, they are sitting on “data lakes provide a single storage for massive amounts of business and system data to drive insights and predictions”.

Why not use this business data, whether it is related to assets, inspections, trafficor construction site plans, to get an overview of your road network status and improve traffic flows, he added. Everything firms need can be found in this data “to investigate threats, monitor systems, and improve performance”.

Ideally, Di Marino recommends the “creation of digital inventories and the full digitisation of inspection processes, based on a modular and scalable platform”. This should enable “health monitoring of infrastructures; transparency and data control; analytics and reporting on assets and defects; and the increased productivity and efficiency of inspection processes”.

In other words, put a centralised asset management and infrastructure monitoring platform in place so that all members of the organisation can use the same data source to make timely and business-critical decisions he added. Meanwhile Marzia Malavisi, head of structural monitoring at Movyon, took the same principles into the detailed work involved in bridge maintenance and inspection. Think about using digital twins and AI, she said, and move away from physically observing and measuring the wear and tear of the bridge structure.

“Create a high-resolution digital twin using multi-resolution technology” and then “perform linear and areal measurements, insert notes directly on the 3D structure, and visualise an initial set of defects suggested by an artificial intelligence system”.

Use the resulting data to “reimagine bridge inspections using a technology that allows to bring the bridge ‘into the office’ and carry out remote and safe inspections , and to analyse high-definition images of hard-to-reach bridge components”.

Get it right, Malavisi said, and it is possible to “apply AI to support inspectors to observe and measure the evolution of defects over time”. And the benefits? A “limited impact” on your highway traffic flows, your key operational needs, and “a higher level of security”.

Think safety too.

And don’t just think about higher profits and lower costs … think safety too. There are huge strategic and operational wins by using big data and AI to speed up response times and reduce fatalities. Michael Vardi, Valerann co-founder shared the company’s vision of leveraging AI to save lives and to make our roads safer.

He talked about the company’s Lanternn platform, a real-time fusion engine that consumes, analyses and organises data from integrated sources by harnessing AI, machine learning, and big data technologies. “The result is a rich, accurate picture of the road, its traffic, infrastructure and conditions, including the most relevant disruptions and safety incidents,” Vardi suggested.

Jacob Rainbow, the company’s technology lead, data fusion, went further, outlining how Lanterrn can help road operators use AI-driven risk prediction to improve road safety. After all, accident risk prediction is a crucial area in the progress towards Vision Zero says Valerann.

The technology predicts risk, Rainbow told the conference, drawing “immediate insights from millions of historical incidents” and fusing it together in “easy-to-understand plain English”. It then puts these feeds into context, using traffic flow and weather reports, and roadside cameras, before “reducing the noise” that big data and information overload can impose. The system uses feedback from apps like Waze, for instance, and aims for “93% compression to mitigate alert fatigue”, he added. There is also a “fuzzy logic fusion engine allows infinite customisation.”

The end result, according to one of the company’s customers, has been an 88% improvement in response relevance, a 25% improvement in response times, and a 40% reduction in the number of accidents. Also, 95% of incident alerts on Lanternn are raised with the operator within five minutes of having taken place. “By having early road incident notifications, we are able to shorten our response time, on parts of the road where we don’t have ITS infrastructure,” says one of Valerann’s Lanternn users.

Who pays?

All of this data investment cannot take place without funding, and several sessions at Asecap Days 2023 looked at how tomorrow’s road infrastructure is going to be financed.

Expect road user charging (RUC) and toll collection revenues to be merged into one platform, but with differentiated billing, said Lubor Lancos, solution consultant at Kapsch TrafficCom. “RUC will be collected from all vehicles for any road they use.” This will be a fuel excise duty replacement and “tolls will be collected on strategic roads determined by the road authorities”.

We should also get ready now for more and more clean air zones, low emission zones and congestion charging - all delivered on the same technology platform, he added.

And governments will need to take the people with them. “RUC collection should be revenue-neutral and should not increase the tax burden on individual ,” Lubor added. All fees must be acceptable and thoroughly explained to the public, otherwise we should get ready for rejection and protest.

It will also be important to keep your revenue streams separate, said Christophe Boutin, executive director of Asfa, the French association of toll motorway companies. We need to decide if the Eurovignette is our “friend or our foe”, he told the conference.

The European Environment Agency defines this as a “fixed annual charge for heavy vehicles calculated in accordance with the damage caused to the environment and road infrastructure, necessary for using the roads in EU countries that do not levy tolls on motorways”. Vignettes are also described as “a form of road pricing imposed on vehicles, usually in addition to their compulsory road tax fees, based on a period of time the vehicle may use the road, instead of road tolls that are based on distance travelled”.

Boutin is also worried about road users being hit with a double whammy, generating anger and disobedience. “Directive 2022/362 the infrastructure charge for heavy-duty vehicles shall be based on the principle of the recovery of infrastructure costs,” he said. “The weighted average infrastructure charge for heavy-duty vehicles shall be related to the construction costs and the costs of operating, maintaining and developing the infrastructure network concerned. The weighted average infrastructure charge may also include a return on capital and/or a profit margin based on market conditions.”

However, the reality is that external cost charges may be introduced on top of tariffs, Boutin said. “But must not fund infrastructure. A combination of RUC and toll fees seems unlikely when both are needed, but RUC should compensate for gas tax disappearance and tolls should be used for infrastructure funding.”

And the clock is ticking. It is interesting to note that 90% of France’s toll concessions will come to an end in the 2030s. Decisions are going to be needed very soon.

The bottom line

Despite all the noise and all the good intentions, and no matter what happens, we must never forget that traffic and revenue is always the bottom line, said John Davis, commercial director at ViaPlus Europe.

Road tolling is rather like a modern watch, he said. It has evolved into something far more complex than its predecessors. But we must never forget that its core purpose is still to generate cash - just as a modern watch still exists to tell the time.

“Tolling marches on,” said Davis. “Toll systems have evolved from manual, to mechanical and electrical, to digital, and now to the smart IoTT … but their core function remains unchanged. It is to optimise traffic and assure revenues.”

Today, more than ever, it is all about the customer, he added: “There has to be a proven correlation between compliance and quality customer service. Customer experience levels are crucial to both traffic and revenue.”

In the early phases of tolling evolution there was a ‘user pays’ focus, with the monies raised used to finance infrastructure, according to Davis. “The concept of ‘customers’ was not on the radar. Then there was a recognition that quality customer service is crucial to revenue realisation and a ‘Who Owns the Customer?’ question arose.

“Today, we have a digital-first approach to customer service and the ‘Who Owns the Customer?’ question has become more complex.”

Complex solutions are therefore going to be needed and, once again, this is where the intelligent use of data will help drive better decisions.

https://www.itsinternational.com/its1/feature/asecap-days-2023-data-drives-best-decisions