For more than thirty years EuroSign, manufacturer of traffic signs from Fernelmont, has been offering standard and customised products with extremely short delivery times. The company is currently developing a project on intelligent traffic signalling that could revolutionise the market.
EuroSign initially approached Sirris for the development of products intended for export. The Sirris experts soon proposed to develop a more innovative product: a traffic sign made of plastic. Initially EuroSign had its doubts, but when analysing the advantages of this product, it appeared that this panel would offer better resistance thanks to its shape memory and would run less risk of being stolen, as is the case with aluminium today. Sirris thought it could become even better and proposed to develop a traffic sign capable of communicating.
Innovative product and business model
The 'SmartSign' project comprises several assets: the road signs are made of recycled, recyclable plastic and are therefore more durable and can also communicate with service vehicles in the vicinity (patrol cars, garbage trucks,...) about anomalies that were detected, such as a collision, bad orientation, etc. The information acquired through a proprietary network allows the repair or replacement of the boards to be scheduled automatically.
In addition to the technical innovations, the originality of the project is also based on the business model. EuroSign proposes a maintenance service in the form of leasing that keeps road authorities from having to worry about the purchase, repair and replacement of road signs and allows them to count on a fixed budget.
The software has recently become functional and the prototypes are being tested on the roads of Fernelmont. Marketing is scheduled for June 2021 and a series of developments linked to the sensor box have already been examined: additional measurements, such as air quality, communication with autonomous vehicles in the future, etc.
EuroSign has already learned a lot about plastics and informatics during the elaboration of this project, together with Sirris and Multitel. In fact, the application options are so numerous that we really need to keep our focus.
This blog is based on an article published in CCI mag'.
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(Source picture: CCI mag)
