Aabenraa
At first glance, there may seem to be a considerable stretch between a pothole on a rural Danish road in Southern Jutland and an advanced AI-based software. However, in Aabenraa Municipality, these two elements are united in an innovative solution that saves time and money.
Aabenraa is responsible for maintaining 1,600 kilometres of municipal asphalt roads that require regular inspections for damages, repairs, and other maintenance needs. Previously, road condition inspections including all types of damages were a manual task outsourced to the Danish Road Directorate over a three year period.
"With Pluto, we have achieved an improved and more affordable product compared to when we relied on external consultants. Today, we have a more precise, objective, and updated database with user friendly tools for task planning."
From manual to digital road inspections
Since the introduction of the new digital road inspection system, the recorded number of road inventory, urgent and non-urgent damages has significantly increased from 9,000 to over 400,000. This notable increase does not necessarily mean that the road condition has worsened. Rather, it reflects the higher detail-level of a digital solution in which each individual damage is registered. This is a contrast to previous manual inspections that relies on estimates of entire road stretches to reduce registration time.
Consequently, the damage level scores of the road have not significantly increased following the transition to Pluto's digital system. Instead, it has become possible to be more precise which enables the registrations to be applied for other maintenance tasks.
Faster, cheaper and more actionable
The manual registration process used to include 18 categories. Today, with the help of artificial intelligence, we can record over 65 categories and more than 200 sign categories. Unlike humans, AI can detect unlimited categories simultaneously. Manual registration of this scale would cost hundreds of thousands.
Jakob Scholdan from Aabenraa's operational unit affirms the benefits of transitioning to a digital inspection tool stating:
"In the past, we could only update one-third of the road network each year due to budget constraints. This often led to outdated data and limited use cases. Today, we update our data on the entire road network several times a year and still save money.
This provides the municipality with up-to-date information for consistently prioritising tasks such as re-marking road markings, replacing faded signs, and proactively addressing damages like potholes. The manual road inspection was a very cumbersome and resource-intensive task. It takes a long time to drive through all the roads at low speed, where for each damage, you have to stop and note the type and extent of the damage."
Following the interview conducted in 2023, more categories have been added to the system.
A solution for the entire maintenance lifecycle
"We have received a tremendous amount of data, which provides us with a better foundation for decision-making when we need to lay new asphalt. We can now assess damages in the office and promptly assign recorded damage to an employee as a task to be resolved" says Jakob Scholdan.
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