Photo: Accurate road weather models and real-time warnings benefit both drivers and road maintenance. © Rauno Kuusela
Traffic automation will increase in the coming years, and challenging road weather conditions will become more frequent due to climate change. Vehicles need reliable communications and accurate information about the state of the road network. By utilising next-generation data networks (5G-Advanced and 6G), combining different data sources and using artificial intelligence, road weather models and traffic situational awareness can be improved, which contributes to traffic safety and enables more efficient road maintenance.
Automated vehicles need accurate and up-to-date information about the traffic environment, such as road weather, and a reliable connection to back-end systems, for example, to support remote monitoring and remote driving. Road maintenance will become more difficult as difficult weather conditions (such as freezing rains) caused by climate change become more common. In current road weather models, radar observations provide additional information on short-term precipitation data, but further away from weather radars the accuracy is low and the needs of road maintenance are not met.
A large Finnish consortium consisting of VTT, the Finnish Meteorological Institute, Destia, Mattersoft, Aventi, Fleetlogis, Rel-Palvelu and Snower is collaborating in the SafeRoute-6G project with as main goal to improve traffic safety and efficiency. SafeRoute-6G is an international project that is part of the Celtic-NEXT programme, and the Finnish part of the project is funded by Business Finland. The international consortium includes organisations from Luxembourg, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Korea, Canada, Austria and Spain. The project will last until April 2028.
The Finnish consortium focuses on two main themes in the SafeRoute-6G project: improving road weather and traffic monitoring and road weather forecasting, and improving the reliability of communication between vehicles and back-end systems.
Road weather and traffic information is improved by combining data from weather radars, roadside systems, vehicle sensors and including maintenance activities. This enables more accurate local weather and road surface forecasts, supports efficient road maintenance and improves traffic safety, especially in extreme conditions that are occurring more frequent due to climate change, such as freezing rain. In addition, the project will investigate how roadside sensors can detect abnormal events and how automated vehicles can use this event information during driving.
Communication between vehicles and back-end systems will be improved through, among others, hybrid connectivity, network slicing, edge computing and radio redundancy, including satellite communications. The long-term goal of the project is to reduce traffic accidents and improve the flow and safety of traffic towards a smart, connected transport system for the 5G-Advanced and 6G era.
For more information, please contact:
VTT, Johan Scholliers, [email protected], +358405370204
Ilmatieteen laitos, Timo Sukuvaara
Destia, Oiva Huuskonen
Aventi, Laura Riihentupa
Mattersoft, Tomi Korhonen
Fleetlogis, Jouni Heikkinen
Rel-Palvelu, Reima Leinonen
Snower, Lauri Nieminen
Project website: https://saferoute6g.fmi.fi
