Vehicle-Sensing Digital Twin for Highway Maintenance Decision-Making

ongoing

Currently, highways, as one of the major financial community assets, predominantly rely on manual surveys by inspectors for their maintenance, followed by necessary repair actions taken by asset managers; a static process that causes significant delays and cost inefficiencies. As the world experiences its fourth industrial revolution, commonly known as Industry 4.0 (I4.0), practitioners are beginning to engage with I4.0 technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and digital twins (DT). Such technologies are automating and digitizing previously analogue processes, enabling modern and sustainable asset management. However, their adoption is often based on big data, and the availability of such data for vast highway assets is a problem; deploying sensors across extensive highway networks is costly. To solve this, we propose using sensor data from passenger vehicles to monitor highway assets, serving as a link between I4.0 and highway maintenance. On the other hand, I4.0 will have limited value if they focus solely on building information modelling (BIM) and data storage. This requires an information-knowledge-action framework to plan long-term maintenance strategies, thereby realizing the economic value of information and achieving sector renewal. This project will: a) develop an interface to integrate sensor data from passenger vehicles into DT to access real-time updates on highway assets (data from Mercedes-Benz); b) propose a holistic model to support decision-making based on the updates. The model and surrounding findings will be transformed using co-design methods into a suite of industry-targeted tools tailored to the National Highways (NH) asset operators. I will move to University of Cambridge to complete this fellowship. Didimi will participate as an associated partner, providing access to proprietary data from Mercedes-Benz (MB) passenger vehicles and key point of contacts (POCs) from the pilot highway operator NH team and the maintenance team Costain.