RMIT – AUFRANDE

The relationship between road infrastructure and economic development is a major subject of study, particularly with the prospect of 25 million kilometres of new roads being built by 2050. Vegetated strips of land along roads, known as verges or roadsides, play an essential role as barriers between traffic lanes and the surrounding landscape. The widespread growth in road infrastructure is having a significant impact on these areas.

Recent research has shown that verges make a significant contribution to mitigating the impact of roads on the land and its ecosystems. Sustainable management of these green spaces can offer a variety of ecosystem services, thereby improving the quality of life of citizens. The maintenance of verges raises a number of interconnected issues: (i) economic, such as ongoing investment in maintenance equipment and the attractiveness of areas linked to the quality of the environment; (ii) technological, through the recovery of biomass and the reduction of the carbon footprint; (iii) social, in terms of road safety and flood and fire prevention; and (iv) environmental, in terms of preserving biodiversity and improving the quality of water, air and soil.

Optimising roadside maintenance is a major challenge for local authorities, requiring substantial budgets and meticulous annual maintenance in terms of personnel and equipment. Informed decisions about personnel management are based on the need to cover a minimum distance in a limited time, incorporating critical factors that call for a modelling approach to decision-making based on concrete data.

This project is looking at the planning of optimal trajectories for verge maintenance machines, particularly mowing machines, in order to minimise economic and environmental costs while reducing their impact on the land. In this project, local authorities will also be able to act as testing grounds.

The project has three main phases:

1. Investigating and collecting all the data relating to the maintenance of verges in several regions of France.
2. Develop a multi-objective optimisation algorithm that will find the minimum route to follow to maintain all types of road in a dedicated area, starting from their own technical centre.
3. Construct several scenarios for optimisation approaches based on time and personnel constraints, aimed at reducing fuel consumption and the time allocated throughout the year.