Slovak Hydrometeorological Institute and SOFTEC ensure road safety with Azure

Each winter, Slovakian authorities struggle to deal with unexpected weather conditions to ensure road safety. Monitoring was a challenge; for instance, the municipality of Bratislava only operated two conventional weather stations. Adding stations for more accurate predictions was too expensive, costing up to €70,000 per station.

To bridge the gap, the Slovak Hydrometeorological Institute (SHMÚ), a specialized organization providing hydrological and meteorological services on national and international levels, partnered with IT company and Microsoft Gold partner SOFTEC. This collaboration aimed to enable proactive road maintenance, lower costs, and improve environmental impact using real-time data.

“Today, governments are moving away from after-the-fact reactive maintenance to preventive measures before conditions arise. This leads to significant savings and environmental benefits. For example, you can save up to two thirds of salt by salting before snowfall. But authorities need reliable forecasts and information on road temperatures to do this,” explains Ondrej Svacina, Business Development Manager & Senior Consultant at Softec. 

Withstanding harsh winters with technology

As a solution, the SHMÚ and SOFTEC implemented a system of low-cost IoT meteorological stations that measure road variables like surface temperature, humidity and others. “We combine the data from the IoT stations with our data, make forecasts and trigger warnings for road maintenance. Our goal is to offer a better service to our country and also stay profitable thanks to these services,” says Vladimir Rak, the Coordinator of business activities at SHMÚ. “With our system, the authorities are prepared a few days before the situation becomes critical, saving money and sharing a portion of that budget with the providers of the service, SHMÚ and SOFTEC.” 

The data is processed, stored and presented using Microsoft Azure technologies. “Azure was a natural fit for us as we relied on Microsoft solutions for other services,” remembers Svacina. “In the beginning, we had a limited understanding of Azure services but with time, we started discovering more functionalities. Today we rely heavily on Azure. We don’t need to burden ourselves with the technological infrastructure and servers, we simply concentrate on business functionality. The whole system enables us to make our IoT devices low-energy, low-cost and capable of running on batteries for years.”

Bringing safety to the streets of Bratislava

Before the solution was deployed, road dispatchers could only rely on general meteorological forecasts for the entire city. With the IoT weather stations, they can make more localized interventions like targeted gritting as opposed to citywide salting operations. The country experiences a very diverse meteorological environment; it is sometimes warm and sunny in the city but snowing heavily at a mountain pass, where the traditional weather station is. The new IoT stations serve as an ‘extended eye’ that offers an immediate view of the area, cutting down on the need to make physical field trips to different locations. After the solution was deployed, the number of traffic accidents decreased by 28 percent. The data has also helped social workers to better prepare to aid the homeless during cold spells, enabling them to act as soon as reports of the first frost come in. “Overall, the system gave us a huge advantage and strengthened our reputation. This success speaks to how much benefit Microsoft Azure has brought,” says Rak. “This is just a pilot program but a fully-functioning one. We want to expand it to the entire country, so scalability is very important. Azure enables us to scale seamlessly.”

“Microsoft helped us reach the goals more rapidly and reduce the time to market,” adds Svacina. “By concentrating on business functionalities, we shortened the lifecycle. And thanks to the pricing, Azure came out as the most cost-efficient solution.”

Expansion plans of SHMÚ and SOFTEC include a more proactive and all-encompassing analysis. “We are implementing the next level system, diving into machine learning, covering the entire road network as opposed to only the points where the stations are placed,” says Svacina. “We want to be able to do prescriptive analytics, gathering more insights from the data and providing concrete suggestions for road maintenance. We are not sure what Azure technologies we will use but we are looking forward to discussing the possibilities for agile technologies with Microsoft.”