With the aim to reduce workers’ exposure to live traffic and construction machines, increase the availability of the transport network, reduce the cost of repetitive tasks, and increase the safety of road users, InfraROB promotes significant advances in automating, robotising and modularizing the construction, upgrade and maintenance of the road infrastructure. By focussing on the road bed and, particularly, on roads paved with asphalt (the most widely applied type of pavement in Europe, accounting for 90% of all paved roads and highways ), the project will develop autonomous robotized systems/machinery for (i) (re)paving, (ii) repairing cracks/potholes in the road surface, and (iii) line marking. In addition, it will develop (iv) robotized safety systems for workers and road users. It will then develop (v) integrated one-piece precast construction elements for the roadside drainage serving a major degree of modularization in road design and construction/upgrade. In order to cope with optimal road maintenance planning, the project will furthermore upgrade existing Pavement Management Systems (PMS) to use digital twin models of road networks that track changes of their physical counterparts in real time, to give support for maintenance planning based on dynamic predictive modeling and the acquisition of real-time data on pavement conditions. Finally, yet evenly important, to provide for the safe and coordinated deployment of automated road maintenance robots, the project will attempt the integration of Pavement Management System (PMS) and Traffic Management System (TMS) solutions in order to allow for a holistic, integrated management of road infrastructure and traffic over the whole lifespan.

The general objective of the project is to overcome the barrier established by a formal interpretation of the two Directives 2008/96/EC (on road infrastructure safety management) and 2004/54/EC (on tunnels), that in practice doesn’t allow to perform infrastructure safety checks inside tunnels. The main problem is that, while from the user’s (drivers) point of view a road is a unique linear infrastructure generally in open terrain and sometimes in closed environment (tunnels), a strict application of the two Directives leads to a non-uniform approach to the infrastructure safety management outside and inside tunnels. To overcome this barrier, Ecoroad aims at the establishment of a common enhanced approach to road infrastructure and tunnel safety management by using concepts and criteria of the Directive 2008/96/CE on road infrastructure safety management and the results of related EC funded projects. Such objective will be achieved through the following specific objectives: - Workshops with the stakeholders (European tunnel and road managers); Analysis/review of national practices regarding Road Safety Inspections (RSI) and Road Safety Audit (RSA), starting from the results of the 2 studies recently launched by DG Move to assess the impact of the two Directives 2008/96/EC (on road infrastructure safety management) and 2004/54/EC (on tunnels) - Exchange of best practices and experiences between European tunnel experts and road safety professionals - Pilot joint safety operations in some European road sections having both open roads and tunnels - Recommendations and guidelines for the application of the RSA and RSI concepts within the tunnel safety operations Thanks to the high transferability of the ECOROADS results, the present formal gap (explained in details in the following paragraph) between the Directive 2008/96/EC and the Directive 2004/54/EC will be completely filled and will lead to “ faster, more sustainable and better planned interventions."

The aim of determining fitness to drive is to achieve a balance between minimising any driving-related road safety risks for the individual and the community and maintaining the driver’s lifestyle and employment-related mobility independence. Driving a car is a complex and dynamic task and there is a wide range of conditions that temporarily affect the ability to drive safely like consuming substances or fatigue. Professional drivers are particularly affected by fatigue. The main effect of fatigue is a progressive withdrawal of attention from the road and traffic demands leading to impaired driving performance. The particular practice of professional drivers include working long hours, prolonged night work, working irregular hours, little or poor sleep, and early starting times which in many cases lead to fatigue. Fatigue causes reduced alertness, longer reaction times, memory problems, poorer psychometric coordination, and less efficient information processing. The results of different surveys world-wide show that over 50% of long-haul drivers have at some time almost fallen asleep at the wheel. The project will design, implement and test a new tool, for the monitoring and evaluation of driving performance, cognitive load, physical fatigue and reaction time. The system will create neurophysiological models able to detect the onset of abnormal drivers’ fitness based on data obtained from IoT devices during working activities and while driving, on board intelligence and smart tachographs. Artificial Intelligent models will associate different kinds of anomalous behaviour to its most probable cause: drugs, medicines, alcohol, fatigue, etc.; and a cloud-based system will communicate driver, police patrols, infrastructure the necessary information to improve road safety. Drugs and alcohol have also the potential to adversely affect driving skills; the project will also develop screening methods to detect new drugs and to reduce the time needed to perform the tests.

Road transport is known to be the most dangerous of all transport modes and poses a major societal challenge for EU. It has been claimed that 90% of road-traffic crashes are caused by driver error, being a significant factor in traffic accidents. Improving road safety means understanding the individual and collective behaviour of actors involved (drivers, two wheelers, pedestrians) and their interaction between themselves and safety-related systems and services. The goal of SIMUSAFE (SIMUlator of Behavioural Aspects for SAFEr Transport) following the FESTA-V model methodology is to develop realistic multi-agent behavioural models in a transit environment where researchers will be able to monitor and introduce changes in every aspect, gathering data not available in real world conditions. Driving simulators of several vehicles (cars, motorcycles, bicycles) and Virtual Reality (for pedestrians) will be used to simulate test environments. This will also enable the evaluation of scenarios which are not possible even with naturalistic driving (dangerous conditions, multiple monitored actors in the same scene, under influence of substances). Data collected from simulations will be correlated with naturalistic driving tests, such that the simulation and model aspects are the closest possible to real world data. From the developed model and collected data, impacting factors causing an event (crash, near-collision, infractions) from the environment and road users will be identified and quantified. Such knowledge will be the base for the development of more effective and pro-active measures for the prevention and mitigation of such factors, with subsequent impact in the safety devices market, regulations and driver education.