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.

In modern economy, digitalization is a major driver of productivity growth across industries and services. However, the construction sector is lagging behind, even behind agriculture. The construction sector is characterised by a high presence of SMEs, low capitalization, a low rate of higher educated employees, low investment in innovation, and a long supply chain. Moreover, in the EU market, different languages, taxation, and regulatory frameworks are obstacles to Union synergies. DigiPLACE will exploit EU added value. Several initiatives have been developed at national level to improve the innovation in this sector. At EU level, some projects were devoted to facilitating the exchange of information, practice and knowledge (e.g. CPR 305/2011 and Levels). DigiPLACE will create a common ecosystem of innovation, standardization and commerce with the aim to collect the achieved results and to increase the productivity of the sector and the quality of its end products (building&infrastructure). Could digitalization help the sector to solve these historical issues and future ones? What kind of digitalization, what kind of market, what kind of production and supply-chain we could imagine? What kind of consumers do we have for our products and services. How do these worlds work together? DigiPLACE aims to investigate all these themes with a strong analysis of markets, actors and barriers. It will define a Reference Architecture Framework (RAF) for digital construction platform based on an EU-wide consensus involving a large community of stakeholders and the expertise of selected key players, resulting in a strategic roadmap for successful implementation of this RAF. DigiPLACE will rely on a large set of partners, linked 3rd parties and an Advisory Board representing leading European entities, companies and/or associations of industry, builders, owners (private and public), architects, research institutes, and ICT firms (for digital production, services and knowledge).