As part of its multi-year motorway maintenance and response contract for Area 9 with National Highways, Colas Ltd, a subsidiary of Colas in the United Kingdom, will roll out the Anais service for a period of one year. Anais is a digital tool that promotes optimized preventive road asset management. This will be the first time that the Colas Group is deploying Anais outside of France and also the first time on a motorway network.

Created by Mobility by Colas, Anais will be up and running as of June and will be used on the entire network covered by the multi-year contract, i.e., a total length of 3,760 km of motorways and trunk roads around Birmingham. The service uses traditional road monitoring methods and enhances them with digital technology to identify potentially hazardous zones based on onboard driving data. After analyzing the data, teams at Colas make recommendations to the infrastructure managers on how to improve the potentially hazardous zones.

Since its launch, Anais has been enhanced, and can now also be used to analyze the benefits of work carried out on the network, thanks to indicators that measure improvements in user safety once work has been done on a previously detected potentially hazardous area. Using Anais across Area 9 will allow National Highways to target and anticipate investment and maintenance needs for infrastructure development, both in terms of use and safety. Anais' ambition from the start has been to make mobility safer through optimized, preventive road asset management.

"The Colas Group is a leader in the construction of high-quality, sustainable, resilient road infrastructure that meets the challenges faced by local communities regarding mobility, development and attractiveness. Our approach has made headway and we can now offer integrated road asset management, providing a solid response to local authorities who want to keep a close eye on maintenance expenditure," explains Fabrice Luriot, Director of Mobility by Colas.

"We are always keen to find new ways to improve safety on our roads. Using this new source of data to support our current processes could improve our ability to target areas in need of maintenance, making journeys safer and smoother. As part of our Digital Roads project, we are embracing new ideas and technologies, and we look forward to seeing the results of this trial as well as the benefits it could bring," says Paul Elliott, National Highways' Head of Service Delivery for the Midlands.

The Anais digital service is already deployed on the road networks of several departments in France and received the road safety innovation prize awarded by the French Interministerial Delegation for Road Safety in 2019. This first project outside of France illustrates the Colas Group's ability to develop new businesses beyond its traditional know-how as a leader in infrastructure construction.