Overview
Winter services and de-icing strategy are becoming more and more demanding in terms of requirement. Salt-spreading is in fact strictly related to road safety, environmental impact (more salt means damages to the environment) and social costs (salt is becoming quite expensive). Heavy snow events and major sub-zero temperature Europe-wide amplified such problems connected to roads and highway management. In December 2008 during the first heavy snow of the winter in the only city of Torino (Italy) 2000 tons of salt have been employed for de-icing. But more dangerous, an erroneous salt spreading strategy can increase the risks for drivers. There is then the need to set up advanced operational centre able to optimize salt-spreading and navigation management of professional vehicles as well as increasing the security of road operations and citizens introducing the emergency call paradigms on such professional vehicles.
GOLDEN-ICE aims at exploiting the EGNOS innovations in the field of winter services equipment (professional trucks and vehicles) with the objective to introduce advanced concepts in relation to salt spreading control, road safety and emergency. More specifically the goal of the project is to improve the de-icing strategy currently employed by highways management and municipal departments.
GOLDEN-ICE will generate a end-to-end system based on EGNOS augmentations able to meet the aforementioned parameters. New On Board Units for salt-spreading vehicles will be developed as well as new strategies for the fleet control will be implemented. In order to achieved the highlighted goals GOLDEN-ICE has created a consortium of private companies as well as research centers able to integrate high technical skill and close to market commercial members. Using the experiences of the commercial partners and the technical outputs of the GOLDEN-ICE a suitable business plan has been drafted for keeping the research project closed to the market requirements.