Potholes, cracks… As the French road network has generally deteriorated over the past 15 years, Cyclomedia helps local authorities diagnose the condition of their roads, optimize maintenance scheduling, and improve user experience.
Cyclomedia announces the availability of “Road Surface Analysis” in France, a solution that automatically detects road anomalies and damage to help local authorities manage their road infrastructure.
A French Road Network in Poor Condition
With over 1 million kilometers, the French road network is one of the longest and densest in Europe. However, it is also an aging network that has progressively deteriorated. Between 2012 and 2019, France dropped from 1st to 18th place in the World Economic Forum’s “Quality of Road Infrastructure” ranking, far behind the Netherlands and Switzerland. Despite investments, the latest national road observatory published in 2023 highlights that nearly 20% of national roads and about 10% of departmental and municipal roads remain in “poor condition,” with varying quality depending on the department.
“In the context of the progressive decentralization of the national road network, the responsibility for road maintenance now falls to local authorities, which often lack the financial, technical, and human resources necessary to carry out this extensive mission,” explains Arnaud Le Régent, Sales Director for France at Cyclomedia. “It has therefore become essential to provide them with proven technologies to assist them in this transition, to lighten and facilitate their daily work, for example, by automating the detection of road damage to help prioritize investments and plan preventive and corrective maintenance for user comfort and safety.”
Artificial Intelligence for Better Knowledge of Road Assets
Traditionally, road infrastructure managers conduct visual inspections with field visits to perform pavement surveys, inventories, and diagnostics. This method is time-consuming, costly, dependent on human interpretation, and does not allow for easy data exploitation within local authority information systems.
Road Surface Analysis is a unique solution that combines high-resolution immersive geospatial imagery with an algorithm based on artificial intelligence (AI). This imagery, acquired by Cyclomedia’s sensors, is used as input data to feed the algorithm, which is specifically trained to automatically detect pavement damage, classify it, and rate it based on its severity and extent. Cyclomedia’s patented data acquisition system consists of powerful sensors (cameras, LiDAR lasers, satellite positioning system, etc.). Their synchronization offers precise positioning and significant detail of the detected elements.
“The quality of the imagery acquired in the field is essential because it constitutes a cartographic reference from which the algorithms work to detect and extract information and attribute data. All of this data is thus easily exploitable within geographic and road information systems, allowing for in-depth analyses,” explains Arnaud Le Régent, Sales Director for France at Cyclomedia.
From their office, managers are now fully immersed thanks to panoramic views, 3D representation (LiDAR), and Artificial Intelligence, which provide reliable and comprehensive descriptive data of the road infrastructure. A faithful, precise, and detailed rendering of the environment simplifies daily work with reliable results, immediate access to the field, and allows for a comprehensive understanding and knowledge of the entire asset.
A global view of the road infrastructure and its condition facilitates its maintenance, operation, and financial management, optimized through monitoring applications and intuitive dashboards, thus facilitating decision-making for establishing multi-year investment plans.