Slippery Roads

We leverage the crowd intelligence of the Mercedes-Benz customer fleet as moving micro-weather stations to detect slippery roads.

Digital winter maintenance by leveraging the power of data

Road authorities focus increasingly on digital solutions and local weather stations to improve safety. Additionally, public authorities and road maintenance departments increase their impact on safety and efficiency by using data. Winter maintenance is a crucial part of road safety.

Our Mercedes-Benz data on slippery road events is the complementary information to increase coverage with precise and real-time information. We leverage the crowd intelligence of the Mercedes-Benz customer fleet as moving micro-weather stations to detect slippery roads and warn other vehicles of dangerous road events ahead to increase safety.

The cars provide the information in real-time to public authorities to increase traffic safety and efficiency of municipal winter services. Our Slippery Roads Product is already successfully used by several road departments to steer their winter activities more efficiently.

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Ready-to-use Data Dashboard

This data product is available as a data layer within the Mercedes-Benz Data Dashboard. Visit the product page for more information.

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Benefits

Our Slippery Road Product identifies, displays and analyzes critical safety hotspots in your street network helping to take the right actions.

  • Real-time information: Highly accurate and real-time information of slippery road hotspots in your street network.

  • Ad-hoc operations & strategic planning: Use the dashboard for your operational day-to-day business or strategic planning for the next winter season by analyzing historical data.

  • From data to insights: Displaying data insights by providing detailed information about weather conditions based on a weather API and vehicle weather.

  • Multiple product layers: Option to integrate various products beyond Road Safety via plug-in technology.

  • Data validity: Highly accurate data, only showing true positive events through a validation mechanism.

  • Various dashboard functions: Many functions such as historical analysis, uploading of 3rd party data, use various filter options for precise analytics.

The product

Learn more about our Slippery Road Product

With our established Car-to-X technology, our vehicles communicate between each other and the transport infrastructure. This system has been integrated since 2016.

Real-time information

Once the ESP® or ABS sensors of these vehicles have recognized slippery road conditions, this information including the GPS position is sent to the Mercedes-Benz Vehicle Backend in real time, using the mobile radio network.

Anonymized data usage

Data is only shared if the Mercedes-Benz driver provided their consent for the purpose of sharing with third parties via their user accounts on the Mercedes me Portal.

This anonymized information on road conditions is displayed on a digital map in real time and helps authorities to deploy the winter service more effectively and optimize the use of de-icing salt.

Notebook on Mercedes-Benz Data Hub showing a map with relevant slippery road hotspots
Map with relevant Slippery Road Hotspots
How it works

Functions and features of the Slippery Roads Dashboard

1. Various data insights

The slippery road events are displayed on a map including time stamp, street name and exact GPS position. Additional information such as temperature and rainfall can be added via a weather layer based on an external weather API and our Mercedes-Benz vehicles reporting weather information.

2. Filter options

The dashboard allows filtering based on time and street classification to show only the most relevant events per street class including a time filter.

3. Ad-hoc operations & strategic planning

Use the dashboard for your operational day-to-day business or strategic planning for the next winter season by analyzing historical data.

4. Integration of 3rd party data

Further integration of external 3rd party data is possible (e.g. integration of local weather stations or data of your road maintenance vehicles).

5. Post-season analysis

Recording of historical events allows for post-season analysis e.g. indication of streets with high number of slippery road events.

Slippery Road Dashboard screen on Mercedes-Benz Data Hub – showing details of a critical hotspot
Search screen of Slippery Road Dashboard on Mercedes-Benz Data Hub
Statistics screen of Slippery Road Dashboard on Mercedes-Benz Data Hub
References

Improving road safety in the Zollernalb district

The tool is used by a multitude of customers as complementary information in their day-to-day business but also for evaluating and planning the new winter seasons.

The Zollernalb district is challenging in terms of both topography and climate: the region has the highest hills in the Swabian Alps range. In 2018 no less than 82 frosty and 13 icy days were recorded. With its two road maintenance depots in Balingen and Albstadt-Lautlingen, the district is responsible for around 150 kilometres of federal highways, 210 kilometres of country roads and 270 kilometres of district roads.

District administrator Günther-Martin Pauli is pleased with the partnership between his district and Mercedes-Benz in this innovative project.

“
We are jointly pursuing the same, clear goal of improving safety on our roads with new, digital technology. This cooperation perfectly fits into our strategy of performing our work even better with digital tools. This is in the interests of all those who live and work in the Zollernalb district, and therefore a contribution to a continued, high quality of life in the district.
”

Günther-Martin Pauli,
District administrator Zollernalbkreis

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The pilot test started in February 2020
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Here you can find a collection of questions we’ve been asked by our customers.

Is the data display in real-time?

Yes, with a latency below 1 second, the data is transmitted from the vehicle to our backend and from the backend to the dashboard.

What is the data source?

The data comes from the Mercedes-Benz Car & Van customer fleet. Based on the ABS and ESP sensors, we generate information on slippery roads.

What is the technology behind the dashboard?

We use our established Car-to-X technology. Our vehicles send the data via cellular radio / mobile communications.

How do you exclude “false positive” events?

We have an algorithm in our back-end that validates the events based on engine types, temperature etc.

Can you display further information on the dashboard?

Yes, external data sources can be displayed on the dashboard.

How is data protection handled and is the data anonymized?

We only use data from customers who provided their explicit consent. The data is anonymized and processed according to GDPR.

Can the data be integrated in other data sources?

We offer the data also via a Rest-API to integrate the product in existing customer solutions.

Contact

Talk to our product experts!

Our product experts will help you with finding the best product fit and guide you through our purchase and onboarding processes.

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