Highways Group Fog Monitoring and Early Warning
Background & Requirements
Fog is one of the most common hazardous weather conditions on expressways. With advancing urbanization and growing road network density, the adverse impacts of fog on highway traffic safety have become increasingly severe. Among the weather phenomena triggering severe traffic accidents across most regions of China, low-visibility conditions such as heavy fog, dust and sandstorms exert the greatest influence. In particular, dense fog with visibility below 50 meters is a major cause of serious traffic accidents. Failure to efficiently and accurately monitor patchy fog on expressway pavements and issue timely early warnings to running vehicles will lead to large-scale traffic congestion and even complete traffic paralysis.
Solution Overview
This system integrates advanced technologies including lidar, big data and artificial intelligence to build an expressway visibility monitoring and early warning system, which can detect patchy fog and the spatial distribution of visibility within a 10-kilometer range of the expressway and release corresponding early warnings. By collecting high-precision and high-resolution visibility data of highways, the system effectively tracks the changing trend of patchy fog. Combined with GIS digital geographic information and map databases, the layout of visibility monitoring equipment is planned according to actual highway conditions, with one device installed every 15 kilometers along the road.
Measurement Effect
The visibility distribution map of June 24, 2018 is loaded into the GIS map. As shown in the red-marked expressway sections in the figure, patchy fog with visibility ranging from 200 m to 400 m appears on part of the road. Vehicles passing through this area without early warnings are highly prone to traffic accidents.
