Renowned surveying and asset management company WDM has announced a partnership with Metricell and its SmartVision AI insight technology.
The collaboration will help deliver 'scalable surveying services' that meet the requirements of the new PAS 2161 road condition monitoring standard, allowing highway authorities to transition to the new national approach while 'retaining the granular objective data collected by WDM's Road Assessment Vehicles (RAV), which operate to the SCANNER specification', WDM said.
WDM has decades of experience using SCANNER technology for highway surveying and strategic road management planning. This network knowledge is now combined with SmartVision's artificial intelligence capabilities, which use computer vision models developed in the UK and trained on over 11 million images to accurately identify more than 120 road condition criteria.
The partnership aims to ensure that 'condition assessments remain accurate, repeatable, and scalable across networks while maintaining confidence in results used to inform national statistics and maintenance planning'.
It can also help highways authorities to access a wide range of additional road condition data from a single survey.
WDM said in a press statement: 'High-quality survey data provides far more than a snapshot of road condition. When collected and interpreted correctly, it becomes a foundation for wider infrastructure insight, supporting the monitoring of additional highway assets, improving maintenance planning, and enabling authorities to move towards more proactive and predictive network management.
'By combining WDM's survey expertise with SmartVision's AI powered analytics, the collaboration aims to provide local authorities with detailed, more actionable datasets. Ultimately, it is the quality and integrity of this data that enables highway authorities to plan effective maintenance strategies, optimise budgets, and deliver safer, more resilient road networks to benefit the communities they serve.'
