Driving across pothole-ridden streets is frustrating, to say the least. Jarring bump after bump quickly evokes emotional pains of expensive car repairs. Fortunately, this week’s IoT use case focuses on helping local governments monitor and maintain failing infrastructure before it leads to highly frustrated citizens.
Introducing Yotta, a technology company that helps local authorities and utility companies understand their infrastructure – like roads and streetlights – better by surveying and analysing the environment. Through a combination of IoT sensor data and manual surveys, the company aims to provide analytics to help make the right operationally and strategic decisions about infrastructure management. It’s predictive maintenance and asset management for infrastructure effectiveness.
For example, managing the life cycle of street lights. Sensing the type of lamps that typically have defected over a specific period, the company can estimate how many of those types of lamps are likely to fail in future years. This enables local governments to budget for replacements. Another example is with roadways and potholes. As an article by www.zdnet.com highlighted, “the types of fault that we see with the road surface are caused by water ingress in between layers — with cold water that then freezes and therefore expands causing potholes to appear. Historically, this has been dealt with by trying to create a single map layer showing all the assets. But in connected-asset management, this whole thing can go a stage further to ask, “What are the dependencies between these two different asset types?” Then we can start to monitor which different gullies are being blocked, where are the different flood areas, what possible impact can that have on some of the different assets groups that are around and so on.”
Another great example how the Internet of Things is transforming traditional industries. Certainly, government funding still plays a huge role in actually addressing potholes and other maintenance requirements once they are predicted. But, at least, the data will be available to support the expenditure and to help authorities make better decisions to keep citizens and their cars happier.
