Northern Traffic Lights

The importance of trafficable private gravel roads in the Aurora program area is significant. Currently, information on the trafficability of gravel roads relies on the local knowledge of residents and road users. This information is scattered, imprecise, and difficult to access and use. New road data would assist individuals in making decisions about personal road use, road maintenance, and business transportation in agriculture, forestry, tourism, and green industries. The main goal of the Interreg Aurora-funded project Northern Traffic Lights is to develop digital solutions for monitoring and predicting i) trafficability and ii) maintenance needs of private gravel roads. The project’s results will heavily depend on the use of rapidly advancing open data sources, increased vehicle data utilisation, and digitisation opportunities to create visual map-based decision support tools for road users and other stakeholders. The project comprises five work packages: i) information systems for private gravel roads, ii) expansion of road weather stations, iii) dynamic trafficability modelling, iv) online trafficability platform Northern Traffic Lights, and v) networking and dissemination. SLU contributes to WP2, WP3 and WP4 through coordinated field instrumentation, data acquisition and stakeholder validation. In WP2, SLU supports the definition of common data standards and participates in establishing the Swedish road weather station network, including sensor-equipped stations and associated road segments. SLU also contributes to trafficability data collection via e-module measurements and stress-testing with loaded timber trucks. In WP3, SLU provides national datasets and participates in data integration, model development and model validation using Swedish field measurements. In WP4, SLU is responsible for stakeholder testing of the Northern Traffic Lights prototype in Sweden, evaluating model accuracy, usability and operational impact for forest transport and road maintenance. Partners involved are Luke, University of Eastern Finland, University of Oulu, Finnish Meteorological Institute and Finnish Forest Centre from Finland, and Skogforsk, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Luleå University of Technology, Linnaeus Universityand Creative Optimization from Sweden.