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Description of Works
FM Conway has been working with East Sussex County Council to trial a new telematics system that will help the council to build data on its road network and anticipate future repairs. FM Conway currently provides planned highway maintenance services across the county’s road network as part of a £56 million surfacing partnership with East Sussex and Costain/Jacobs.
We have been trialling a new sensor system that automatically records data on the conditions under which highways materials are laid.
At FM Conway, our self-supply of asphalt means that we can provide detailed data for customers about the composition of our highway materials.
Jak Edwards, Senior Contracts Manager at FM Conway, explains:
“Sensors affixed to our vehicles track information about each load. The tracking starts as soon as a mix is loaded at one of our asphalt manufacturing plants, logging vital statistics like mix composition, time of loading and temperature at loading. Once on site, sensors on our pavers track the temperature at rolling, the density of the mix as it goes down, how many passes are performed by the roller, weather conditions like humidity, wind speed and temperature, and the exact location using GPS."
Jak Edwards - Senior Contracts Manager at FM ConwayUnderstanding exactly what highway materials you’re laying and how they are laid on a road is vital to predicting how that road will perform in the future.
The system is driving up productivity for the FM Conway team, freeing up the technicians to concentrate on more challenging work. “By using sensors to record data, we gain a skilled person,” says Jak.
“The aspiration is that we’ll be able to build up a bank of data about material performance and laying conditions so that we can start to identify patterns, so, for example, we may find that materials laid in wet conditions typically have a shorter lifespan than materials laid in the dry." This kind of insight helps customers adapt their maintenance planning and anticipate when surface renewal might be required in the future.
Jak continued: “There’s also potential benefits for recycling. If you have an accurate data log of what’s been laid, when and where, you can more easily identify which road materials are suitable for re-use."