5G-SAFE+ CELTIC project – Communication Network Enabled Road Safety Services: results and achievements
Communication Network Enabled Road Safety Services – results and achievements
Pekka Eloranta The project aimed to prevent accidents & avoid casualties with 5G-enabled road safety services to vehicles & targeted road maintenance planning services.
Achievements
The 5G-SAFE-PLUS (https://5gsafeplus.fmi.fi/) project successfully aimed at developing 5G-enabled time-critical road safety services to vehicles thus helping to prevent traffic accidents and avoid casualties by delivering 5G-enabled time-critical road safety services to vehicles. Here, accurate road weather, safety, road condition and navigation information play important roles together with direct incident/accident event information. The 5G-SAFE-PLUS services are based on automatic measurements and detections carried out by advanced fixed and mobile sensor systems. The services are thus objective, reliable and based on real measurements. This real-time information has been used for instance optimized snow ploughing services, road maintenance activities, location-based meteorological forecasting & warning, and automatic safety warnings. The collected data has been visualized in a digital twin that has been developed in the project. Naturally, it is important to underline that the project has studied hybrid network environments, including in addition to 5G, also 4G/LTE, ITS-G5 and satellite communication. These issues and their cooperation and compatibility are among the important issues to be studied now and in the future.
Digital twin figure “LIDAR&RadioNetworkCoverage
5G-SAFE-PLUS has had ambitious impact objectives. The main future goal for the developed services and solutions could be summarised briefly in one sentence “we want to save your lives”. For instance, in Finland, there have been severe accidents where several people have died. In one of these accidents in 2004 23 young people lost their lives, when a bus and truck with paper rolls crashed. One of the main reasons was the unexpected and sudden change in the road weather and conditions in the middle of the night on a road, where no other traffic existed. This unfortunate accident could not have been avoided with mere human observation data, since the weather conditions changed very quickly because of many issues that could not be detected by human eyes. But with services that have been developed in 5G-SAFE-PLUS things might have been different.
It is essential to underline that operative meteorological and safety systems cannot rely only on crowdsourcing, which can naturally be used as supporting data. Verified measurements are the mainframe of data. Only sensor-based measurements, advanced analysis and forecasting systems to provide warnings to the vehicles could have helped to avoid this accident. Thus, the ultimate goal of 5G-SAFE-PLUS has been to develop and deliver a reliable and scientific way to provide forecasts and warnings of changes to come, before they actually happen. The conventional (“old slow”) solutions provide information of what was the situation when the observation was done. One can go out and see what the weather is like and also based on one’s personal views try to make up, what is the weather going to be like, whereas partners in 5G-SAFE-PLUS have been scientifically and successfully measuring, modelling, calculating and forecasting the weather with supercomputers.
Conclusion/Outlook
5G-SAFE-PLUS has successfully studied and refined novel 5G-inspired use cases for the vertical automotive sector and analysed the resulting requirements and business models for connectivity and services in participating countries. Based on the use cases and requirements 5G-SAFE-PLUS has designed, developed and used the best possible tools (sensors, measurements, communications, Mobile Edge Computing, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, algorithms, digital twin etc.) to increase safety by providing reliable, measured, scientifically correct real-time information, forecasts and warnings.
Further information:
Project website: https://www.celticnext.eu/project-5g-safe-plus/
Pekka Eloranta Johan Scholliers Timo Sukuvaara
Sitowise Oy VTT FMI
pekka.eloranta@istowise.com johan.scholliers@vtt.fi timo.sukuvaara@fmi.fi
This project has been funded by:
NRC Canada
Business Finland
Luxinnovation
