The ultimate goal of the ESERCOM-D project is to develop standards that enable and foster the provision and commercialization of interoperable services to maintain and exploit highly accurate digital road wear-maps. This includes the automatic detection, geo-positioning and classification of road-wear, and the exchange of information among entities involved in road maintenance, exploitation and usage, even across borders. Maintaining an updated and accurate picture of what is the status of the road infrastructure (a digital twin) helps to better plan the usage and maintenance strategy, to expand the lifetime of the road, to increase safety, and to reduce the overall maintenance costs.

A cornerstone of the project is the availability of an accurate and secure Global Satellite Navigation System (GNSS) to geoposition not only the road-wear, but also the vehicles that are to avoid them and follow specially designed trajectories to minimize road wear and increase safety. For this purpose, the accuracy and security offered by the High Accuracy Service (HAS) and the Open Service Navigation Message Authentication (OSNMA) will play a key role. FGI is the responsible entity to develop, test and characterize a suitable GNSS-based positioning system that complies with the necessary requirements to operate in the selected use cases in the project.

ESERCOM-D is rooted in the results of the previous project ESRIUM, where the first technological challenges were addressed and demonstrated, and technological and standardisation gaps identified. ESERCOM-D will address these gaps, provide fully automated compliant and close to commercialization solutions (TRL8), and demonstrate them in real use cases and environments. The demonstrations will be carried out in motorways and secondary roads, where the whole technological chain will be showcased, from the road-wear map creation all the way to autonomous driving following automatically generated routing recommendations.

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