How road maintenance can be faster, cheaper and better

Road maintenance in the Netherlands has been done the same way for decades. Craftsmanship plays an important role here, but the sector now faces increasing challenges. Tighter deadlines, a shortage of skilled workers and stricter CO₂-constraints make it necessary to embrace new technologies. Because they allow contractors to better address these challenges. 

Any contractor can dream the process of road maintenance: measure the road with cross sections, create a design that shows how much of the road needs to be milled, spray those numbers on the road, put the operator on the milling machine to work doing his job mostly based on experience, and then asphalt and roll. This sounds like a well-oiled process, but it does not always result in an even road that is comfortable for traffic. For example, there may have been a gap somewhere between the cross sections after all, or it was bad weather during milling so the operator could not see the marked grades properly.

People's Work

Road maintenance remains people work, with contractors facing more challenges. "Qualified personnel are scarce and there is little young recruitment. The average age of an asphalt paving crew is around 50," knows Jan Mennink, senior product manager for Paving at Topcon. "Also, deadlines are getting tighter and tighter and road maintenance now causes disruption to traffic," says Sjoerd Stoové, 3D Paving team manager at Topcon. "So the shorter the closure, the better. Major maintenance projects therefore often have to be carried out at night and on weekends, when the contractor's regular, qualified personnel are not available. This leads to hiring staff, which can result in less well matched teams. In addition, cost control is an important aspect that must be observed to avoid unexpected surprises during execution."

Digital control of designs and milling

Like in so many other industries, technology can have a huge impact in road construction. For example, Smoothride from Topcon provides solutions to previously mentioned road maintenance challenges and has even more benefits. "Smoothride makes it possible to measure the entire roadway quickly and accurately. By driving over a lane just once, you have a point cloud with millions of points," says Sjoerd. "Designing the new road is then a piece of cake, as is milling. This process is completely digitally controlled. Smoothride compares the scanned existing situation with the design and knows exactly how many millimeters of the asphalt layer must be milled off," Sjoerd explains. "Fully automatic, so all the driver has to do is drive. Because Smoothride takes a lot of work off your hands, you need less qualified personnel and the whole process is faster."

Predictability in road maintenance

The result after milling is a completely flat road surface; the perfect surface for one homogeneous layer of asphalt that is immediately flat and uniformly thick everywhere after rolling. "In the Netherlands, a new layer of asphalt must have a certain minimum thickness after rolling," says Jan. "In order not to asphalt too thin when uneven, contractors keep a wide margin here. With Smoothride, you can mill so evenly and thus predict the layer thickness very precisely, so a smaller margin can be maintained. For a large area such as a road, this quickly saves tens of thousands of euros in asphalt." Smoothride offers predictability in road maintenance, by calculating very precisely how many tons of asphalt to mill and how many tons of new asphalt are needed. Sjoerd: "This predictability is very nice for contractors."

Innovation: skipping designs

Topcon recently introduced a new functionality for Smoothride: Virtual Ski. The road scan is loaded directly into the milling machine. Sjoerd: "We skip the design process, so to speak; that happens live on the milling machine. Thanks to Virtual Ski's virtual sensors, milling is done very accurately. Moreover, the machine looks 'through the curve'." Jan adds: "With an ordinary ski you can't do that. It looks ahead, i.e. out of the curve. But because we know the alignment of the road thanks to Smoothride, Virtual Ski also knows it."

But even without this application, a contractor can work much faster with Smoothride: it speeds up the road maintenance process, improves road quality and reduces costs. Sjoerd describes, "You can measure the road in the morning, in the afternoon the design is ready and at night you can go into execution. The next morning there is a new road surface."