OHL CONCESIONES and Iridium (ACS GROUP) to co-lead the FOTsis project, one of the largest new technology road transport projects in Europe

OHL Concesiones and Iridium have been named as the co-leaders of the FOTsis project, a major European initiative to develop new technologies for road transportation in the field of cooperative services between the vehicle and the infrastructure.

FOTsis has been selected by the European Commission as one of its major Integrated Projects in the ICT Mobility of the Future area of the 7th EC Framework Program. This means that EU aid will be available to finance the budget of more than €13 million.

This project arose from one of the main research lines of Spain’s OASIS project, the first in Spain to design the highway of the future, which is also co-led by OHL Concesiones and Iridium. Thanks to these projects, both companies have been thrust into an international leadership position in the field of new technologies among infrastructure managers.

In addition to OHL Concesiones and Iridium, as concessionaires, the technology companies, Indra, Sice and GMV and the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM) also participate in the initiative to establish FOTsis. These five companies and the UPM account for more than 30% of the total budget of the consortium, which comprises 23 companies and research institutions from eight European countries.

The objective of FOTsis is to promote the large-scale development and standardization of cooperative services between the infrastructure and the users/vehicles through the use of new technologies, facilitating the exchange of information between the traffic control centers and the devices installed in the vehicles and helping improve safety and the management of mobility on highways.

Among others, FOTsis will provide the following services:

• Emergency and Safety Incident Management
• Intelligent Congestion Control
• Dynamic Route Planning
• Special Vehicle Tracking
• Advanced Enforcement
• Infrastructure Safety Assessment

Traffic management In the area of mobility services, the highway control center can provide information on traffic conditions in real time, collecting data from sensors in the infrastructure and vehicles. Once processed, the information can be forwarded to the users, individually or collectively.

Thus, a user who sends its location and planned route can receive the optimal route according to actual traffic conditions and, where appropriate, the various alternative routes with more reliable arrival times. The infrastructure will gain new traffic management elements, such as variable speed limits, congestion management and route planning tools.

Improved safety In matters of safety, the infrastructure can play a very important role in management, for example, of a road accident, once automatically detected by an emergency call from the vehicle (e-Call) or incident detection systems installed on the infrastructure.

In these situations, the system will send pictures of the accident in real time to allow emergency vehicles to improve the logistics of the response and optimize the routes of the emergency vehicles based on the traffic conditions and the automatic opening of toll lanes or crossings on the median strip to significantly reduce the response time. In addition, all safety services include individual notices to the other vehicles depending on the situation of each.