Road monitoring is a critical component in ensuring road safety and more accurately predicting traffic flow. The implementation of real-time automatic incident detection systems is key to minimising response times to the presence of any type of event such as obstacles or animals, which can pose significant risks to drivers. In addition, constant monitoring of road conditions, specifically in areas susceptible to low temperatures, allows the identification of ice formation and critical points, and thus, proactive measures to prevent accidents associated with adverse weather factors.

ACCIONA is helping to shape the future of smart highways and roads through its experience, technical capacity and sustainable approach, which it puts at the service of the progress of the communities where it executes road projects, with more than 5,000km of roads in more than 25 countries. ACCIONA designs smart roads based on the interconnected concepts of sustainability, innovation and circular economy, building “talking” roads equipped with smart sensors that gather data to improve maintenance, increase traffic efficiency and enhance driver safety.The integration of road monitoring technologies facilitates more autonomous road management, supporting decision-making processes and optimising maintenance operations. This approach not only improves safety, but also promotes efficiency by reducing the need for manual interventions, enabling faster and more effective responses to road events.

ACCIONA is launching this challenge to identify solutions that optimise road management, enable the identification of events that pose a risk to road safety in order to obtain greater operational control and reduce response times. The solution must be able to monitor all critical points of the road and provide high coverage of the controlled section without the need to invade the road at any time. The technologies to respond to this challenge can be of a very varied nature: Computer Vision, Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS), Distributed Temperature Sensing (DTS), IoT embedded in vehicles, satellites, or any other development, software, hardware that contributes to the monitoring of the road.