HPR
Efficient road safety inspections and comprehensive asset management are crucial for maintaining and enhancing national infrastructure. Recognising this need, Hungarian Public Roads collaborated with Pluto to implement an innovative solution that has the long-term potential to automate road inspections and streamline maintenance planning.
From March to July 2024, Hungarian Public Roads (HPR) tested Pluto's system across two maintenance centers: Jászberény and Kisújszállás, which together cover a total of over 600 kilometres of road, providing a representative sample of their network. Feedback from the maintenance teams testing Pluto Record positively affirmed the applications ease of use.
“HPR has been looking at image recognition-based systems to aid road inspections for as long as I’ve been with the company – going on 6 years now. During this time, Pluto has provided us with the most functional solution by far.”
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Usually, road monitoring in Hungary requires employees to drive regularly across their assigned network, manually inspecting and documenting road conditions. When an inspector detects an issue, it was captured a tablet requiring multiple input such as text fields. This process was time-consuming and labour-intensive.
Together with Pluto, HPR identified the following two challenges to address:
- Reduce time on inspections
- Standardising data collection
During the testing period, maintenance workers found Pluto's solution to be intuitive and easy to integrate into their daily routines. Employees quickly adapted to using a mobile app for inspections finding the interface user-friendly. For the road engineers, Pluto provided a detailed overview of road conditions and the engineering team reported that initial results demonstrated clear benefits in data quality and smarter planning tools.
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The collaboration has highlighted the potential of automated road inspection and maintenance planning. This approach provides a robust framework for comprehensive asset management and documentation. HPR looks forward to utilise Pluto’s solution in a more comprehensive study together with the national coach operator Volánbusz. HPR also aims to utilise the higher quality data for reports and strategic decision-making in the long term.
