DRIVE – Dynamic Road Asset Inventory & Virtualization Engine: Road infrastructure management in Italy and Europe faces a systemic challenge: a vast and aging network, whose maintenance still relies primarily on reactive approaches, slow and costly manual inspections, and fragmented and often outdated data.
This approach entails significant safety risks, high operating costs, and inconvenience for the public due to the necessary road closures for inspections. The lack of a holistic and dynamic view of the condition of infrastructure makes maintenance planning suboptimal and inefficient. The project aims to bring about a paradigm shift by introducing a mobile, semi-autonomous, multi-sensor surveying ecosystem designed to enable rapid, comprehensive, and ultra-high-fidelity data acquisition. The fundamental innovation lies in the synergistic integration of a georeferenced ground vehicle, equipped with high-end LiDAR sensors (e.g., LEICA), with a fleet of specialized drones. In this operational model, the vehicle acts as a “mother ship”: a mobile command, launch, recovery, and recharging platform for the drones. This unique architecture overcomes the operational limitations of current systems, enabling continuous and efficient surveying of long linear infrastructures, such as highways, in a single pass. The project’s vision goes beyond mere data collection. The ultimate goal is to provide the foundation for the automatic creation of the infrastructure’s BIM model and, consequently, a dynamic and living Digital Twin of the infrastructure network. This digital twin, initially populated with high-fidelity data acquired by the system, will be designed to be continuously enriched by data streams from fixed IoT sensors (structural monitoring, slope stability) and SCADA systems, evolving from a static model into a tool for predictive and proactive management.