Tunnels and Highways are also Joining the Smart Infrastructure Trend.

Tunnels and highways are critical infrastructures, and proper management is key to ensuring the mobility of citizens and, above all, their safety.

The sector faces several short-term challenges that will lead to a profound technological adaptation of current control and monitoring systems, in addition to an improvement in operational efficiency, both for management and for users.

This implies several challenges, such as:

• Being more connected with users and everything around them.
• Having agility in the execution of changes.
• Having more agile asset management at the monitoring and maintenance level.
• Digitizing operations.
• Increasing security.

These challenges have as a common thread the integration and connection of different systems, people, processes, and locations.

At the systems level, tunnels and highways (and especially tunnels) are infrastructures with a wide variety of different equipment. Integrations with lighting control systems, ventilation systems, weather stations, S.O.S. call boxes, fire or collision detection systems on the road, variable message signs, video recorders, among others, are found and necessary. Likewise, a system capable of integrating all these different technologies is necessary.

On the other hand, people are key, since several actors are part of the interaction between the processes that are carried out. Tunnel users have to have information on what instructions to follow at all times, and the different infrastructure management bodies must be able to efficiently manage any incident or process, be able to monitor it at all times, and automatically involve the action teams in the event of an incident, such as the police or firefighters.

Finally, the different locations are also another key factor, since, on the one hand, it is necessary to cover local control in any of the remote locations, in addition to being able to offer an adequate GIS visualization at the management level, where real-time information on what is happening can be monitored in a geo-referenced way.

These challenges highlight a series of needs that typically occur in the different operators of tunnels and highways:

• Need for a standard and open platform that is capable of INTEGRATING with current equipment (SOS posts, ERUT’s…)
• Stop being captive to a single provider with customized solutions.
• Have control of the infrastructure itself and be able to launch tenders to new providers.
• Need for flexible architectures, fault tolerance, and high availability.
• Autonomy in the creation and management of plans in real time: digitization and automation of procedures.
• Ability to reduce development and maintenance costs.
• Improve management from control centers (Unified control center, local control, and mobility).

It is important to highlight the trend, which is to be able to have a flexible architecture where, first, there is a unified control center, such as the one shown in the following image, which corresponds to a real success story of a Smart Tunnel, deployed in Vallirana during 2019.

The objective and vision of a unified control center involves:

• Offering complete visibility of all operations.
• Increase overall performance through the optimization of operations management.
• Reduce costs, such as energy costs.
• Minimize the impact of failures and breakdowns, and increase visibility.

In addition to the control center, it is important to take mobility into account. Architectures that offer local control within the tunnel and in different locations are necessary, in addition to offering native redundant architectures with high availability. And finally, remote access through mobile applications is another of the needs that complement the control center of a Smart tunnel.

There are already many success stories of Smart tunnels carried out with Wonderware technology: several in Barcelona, in Navarra, the Basque Country… and also internationally, such as the well-known Mont Blanc tunnel.