The initial pilot is the 96-kilometre Ausol Highway, a toll highway that belongs to the AP-7 highway, which is part of the European route E15, Costa del Sol. This highly-congested semi-urban corridor connects the cities of Málaga, Estepona and Guadiaro in the South of Spain. The concession runs parallel to the N340/A7, a free alternative dual carriageway with two lanes per direction and grade or signalised intersections at some points along the road. Pilot will focus not only in the Ausol Highway, but also in the free alternative.
Big Data techniques will be applied in order to meet the following 3 main business goals:
- Understanding the road traffic: Where the main objective is to manage better traffic flows along the corridor and the efficiency of the current infrastructure and to improve the user’s experience on the network by mitigating congestion and adjust the supply to their needs.
- Optimize highway operation: Operations and maintenance tasks can be improved thanks to the analysis of the available data and the optimization of the routes and scheduling of these activities. This will help improving the efficiency of the infrastructure management.
- Guarantee safer roads and make a better use of these roads: by reducing the number of accidents, improving the response time to accidents and reducing the impacts on the traffic flows.
For reaching those purposes, the Big Data infrastructure will be based on 20 different data sources from different stakeholders (public and private entities) where information about traffic, road accidents, meteorological conditions and other variables will be collect: historical data and real-time data.
Based on the existing data sources, linear programming and machine learning applications on SOFIA2 software (by Indra) will be developed in order to establish different model (descriptive and predictive models).
Finally, HORUS software (by Indra) will be the application that will be in charge for assisting the road operators on the operation and maintenance tasks on the highway based on the predictions made the Big Data application.