Floating Car Data for Municipal Maintenance Management

ogether with its Swedish partner company NIRA Dynamics, HELLER has been working for almost five years on innovative solutions for using vehicle data to enable efficient and holistic road asset management.

Following the successful first implementation in the German state of Lower Saxony — where the driveability of state roads has now been continuously monitored and assessed for four years — the first municipal project has now been realized. The city of Griesheim opted for a hybrid solution approach that combines visually image-based pavement condition assessment with a measurement-based method for evaluating road driveability.

The solution is based on fleet data collected during daily traffic operations by standard production vehicles and analyzed in the NIRA cloud. HELLER further processes this information and provides the City of Griesheim with monthly aggregated results via the pavement management system OnKo3.

A particular added value lies in the fact that data collection has already been ongoing since 2021. This makes it possible not only to visualize the current driveability condition for all road sections within the municipal network and the surrounding road network, but also to transparently track developments and trends and use them for forecasting purposes.

The objective of the city administration is to implement road rehabilitation and maintenance measures more precisely in locations where actual driveability restrictions occur. With the new data offering, demands and changes within the road network can be analyzed and evaluated almost in real time. In addition, the data provides a valuable basis for prioritizing measures and for transparent communication with political stakeholders and citizens.

For the current year, the integration of additional traffic-related information is already planned. This includes, among other things, traffic signs detected by vehicles, speeding events, and harsh braking maneuvers, which are intended to support future road safety initiatives.

For HELLER and NIRA, the innovation partnership with the City of Griesheim is of particular importance. It demonstrates that the European automotive industry is not only developing safe and modern vehicles, but can also make a significant contribution to the sustainable maintenance and further development of infrastructure through intelligent data technologies.