AI system changing how North Battleford prioritizes road repairs

Vaisala, a Finnish company that provides environmental and industrial measurement services, serves customers in more than 150 countries.

According to the company, the system processes video footage recorded from any vehicle and automatically detects pavement defects and road-asset features.

The results appear through a digital map interface that city staff can view and annotate without leaving the office — allowing maintenance teams to plan investments and respond to problems before they worsen.

“As for data privacy, the system is safe to use as all data is anonymized, and there is little possibility of having humans or vehicles captured in the field of vision,” Vaisala stated on its website.

A video from the company shows how the RoadAI system wroks.

Blanchard said the key driver of the program is that “we can better plan all of our projects to justify priorities.”

“There’s times where we are doing repairs based on a complaint-driven basis that are essentially jumping the priority queue.”

He said the data will help the city evaluate complaints and decide whether reported problems should be fixed immediately or delayed depending on the actual condition of the surface.

Director of operations James Johansen said the assessments will also help identify roads suitable for milling and overlay before their base fails, extending their lifespan and avoiding full reconstruction.

A demonstration of the RoadAI system is shown during the Oct. 27 North Battleford council meeting, illustrating how the city is using artificial intelligence to assess local road and sidewalk conditions. (Kenneth Cheung/battlefordsNOW)

Mayor Kelli Hawtin said the program shows how technology can make operations more fiscally responsible.

“It’s a good way to catalog some physical information in the community,” Hawtin said.

“Our departments are always responding to complaints, but in order to deal with things, they actually have to physically go out and go and assess an area, whereas this gives us the tools, sometimes at our fingertips, to see what is the concern area and what are people concerned about.”

She said she supports using technology to improve efficiency as long as privacy is protected.

“There’s a lot of technological advancements and tools out there that can help us be a lot more efficient and effective, and we should be exploring those,” Hawtin said.

“Human resources are expensive. If we can use technology to speed up some of those processes and free up our human resources to do other things, we will have no shortage of work.”

Once the assessments are complete, the data will be gradually integrated with information on water mains, service lines, and zoning within the city’s asset management and GIS systems.

While this comprehensive approach is in development and may involve manual adjustments and ongoing refinement, the goal is to guide both short-term repairs and long-term renewal planning with a complete asset-management picture.

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Kenneth.Cheung@pattisonmedia.com

by Kenneth Cheung

AI system changing how North Battleford prioritizes road repairs

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