On December 16, Cintra presented its vision of the infrastructures of the future through Andrea Dall’Oglio, Coordinator of Innovation Projects, at the 2nd Spanish Conference on Smart Roads, which was organized by the Spanish Road Association (AEC).
Cintra presented the AIVIA project at this forum within the framework of strategic mobility transformation projects. AIVIA is a joint project between Cintra and Ferrovial that is building the future of mobility and preparing us for this reality. Its creation and reinvention of the roads are making them safer, more efficient environments that are ready for the arrival of traffic consisting of both self-driving vehicles and the traditional kind. It does this by utilizing connectivity, artificial intelligence (AI), and low-latency communications.
“In the next 30 years, we will see mixed traffic scenarios where conventional, connected, and self-driving vehicles will coexist. This challenge for infrastructure managers arises from the different needs of each type of vehicle.”
Andrea Dall’Oglio went on to explain that Cintra’s AIVIA Project addresses precisely this challenge; its objective is “to allow a safe, efficient transition for all vehicles towards increasingly automated mobility by digitizing infrastructure.“
More specifically, AIVIA has two fundamental goals: on the one hand, ensuring the safety of all users in any circumstance and traffic mix. On the other, coordinating and orchestrating traffic flows with the exchange of information between infrastructure and vehicles, as well as the intelligence of AIVIA’s future traffic management platform. Thanks to this, it will be possible to maximize road safety and the existing infrastructure’s capacity, providing smoother, more efficient, automated traffic.
Andrea explained that AIVIA will be deployed incrementally and will evolve at the pace of technological change and vehicles’ needs. In its initial phase, which is already underway, the use cases will focus on detecting and warning users about any dangerous roadway situations that arise in real-time: vehicles driving in the wrong direction, emergency vehicles or wrecks, objects on the road, slippery stretches.
As the use of connected and self-driving vehicles grows, use cases associated with traffic coordination will be deployed. This is possible through communication between infrastructure and the vehicle: instructions sent to vehicles about the best lane and the optimal speed in every situation, information to help merge onto roads, etc.
During the forum, several interesting topics for the future of mobility were highlighted and discussed, including the importance of data management in mobility, progress in the digital transformation of roads, products and services for digitally adapting roads and mobility, and advanced management of infrastructure and stand-alone services.
