Month: August 2026

Heavy goods vehicles are essential to European trade, but they also bring specific challenges to motorway operators: where do they rest safely, and how are the riskiest loads among them identified and managed? Two MATIS projects, one in France, one in Italy, tackle these questions.

Lugos: rethinking space instead of expanding it

On the A63 motorway between Bordeaux and the Spanish border, Atlandes faced a familiar problem at the Lugos rest area: chronic saturation caused by high volumes of cross-border HGV traffic. Rather than pursuing a costly land expansion, Atlandes redesigned the existing space using a compact “column parking” concept, arranging trucks in groups of four. The result is a jump in capacity from 72 to 128 spaces (a 40% increase) achieved largely through smarter organisation rather than new construction.

The technology behind this reorganisation is what makes it work. License plate recognition at entry and exit tracks vehicles as they arrive and leave, while laser scanners and LIDAR systems monitor occupancy in real time. Drivers indicate their expected break or departure time via a terminal, and the system then guides them to the most efficient available space via variable message signs and a mobile app. Initial simulation point to average peak occupancy rising from 72 to 110, easing saturation without the delays and expense of a traditional expansion project. The project also demonstrates a model that other high-demand corridors could replicate: limiting civil works while still delivering a meaningful capacity gain, alongside greater comfort and safety for resting drivers.

SINA–SATAP: knowing what’s on the road, not just how many

Further along the network, on the A4 Torino–Milano motorway between the Novara Est junction and the Milano Ghisolfa barrier, SINA and SATAP addressed a different question: what exactly is travelling through, and whether it’s safe.

To address that issue, a Weigh-in-Motion (WIM) solution was implemented: two dynamic scales equipped with 28 sensors and 9 cameras, installed across different carriageways, alongside a static weighbridge. The system is designed as a flexible, modular “end-to-end” solution that can be configured to different applications, allowing continuous, real-time weight monitoring without requiring vehicles to stop.

The second component targets dangerous goods specifically: four ADR detection stations, equipped with 10 cameras and dedicated software, interface directly with the radio control room. Intelligent cameras issue a notification for every relevant transit, capturing license plate, country of origin, ADR vehicle plate, transit time, direction and vehicle class. This data feeds into Sincro ADR, a purpose-built software platform providing risk analysis, post-incident strategy management, video analysis integration and automatic alarms for the traffic control centre, giving operators a single, unified view of dangerous goods movements along the corridor, in both routine and emergency conditions.

Tunnels are amongst the most demanding environments on Europe’s road network. Confined spaces, limited visibility and the difficulty of intervening quickly in an emergency all raise the stakes when something goes wrong. Across the MATIS programme, 3 partners have each tackled this challenge and show how MATIS partners are approaching the same underlying question — how to make tunnels safer — from genuinely complementary angles.

Cerchiarello: equipping the tunnel itself

On the A4 Torino–Milano motorway, SATAP focused on the Cerchiarello tunnel, an 800-metre twin-bore structure sitting at a complex interchange node. The tunnel was equipped with a comprehensive package of ITS devices: 18 AID (Automatic Incident Detection) cameras, 7 cross/arrow signs, 3 variable message signs, 4 entrance traffic lights, 127 lighting devices (15 of which are dedicated blue safety-distance lighting), and 5 SOS stations complete with LED signalling and radio retransmission cabling.

The aim is straightforward: reduce the number of accidents and cut the time it takes to manage an emergency once one occurs. The project also included configuration and upgrade work at the control centre itself, so that the new equipment integrates properly with existing operations.

traffix.ai: teaching the cameras to think

Cameras alone are only as good as the software interpreting what they see. That was the starting point for SINA’s work with CDT on the A12 Sestri Levante–Livorno and A15 La Spezia motorways in Tuscany. The issue wasn’t a lack of detection technology: it was the sheer number of false alarms it generated. A change in brightness, or something as trivial as a sheet of paper blown onto the sidewalk, could be misread as a pedestrian, triggering an alert that operators then had to investigate.

The solution, deployed across roughly 26 tunnels, is the traffix.ai software: a system combining 3D object tracking with a Deep Learning module to classify vehicles and detect abnormal traffic situations in real time. The results speak for themselves: in the May–September 2024 evaluation period, the average false alarm rate fell to just 3%, down from around 90% before the software was introduced. That is a dramatic reduction in the noise operators must filter through, freeing them to respond faster to events that are genuinely happening.

AUCAT: a full-scale overhaul on the C-32

On the C-32 motorway near Barcelona, AUCAT faced a different starting point altogether: not one tunnel, but sixteen, spread across a 47 km coastal corridor carrying more than 26,000 vehicles a day. Rather than a single fix, the project set out to modernise the whole safety chain at once, tying every upgrade together through the HORUS tunnel management platform.

Optical sensors on roads and ramps detect oversized trucks before they reach a tunnel too low for them, triggering automatic alerts on nearby signs to guide them off safely. Over 100 new LED warning signs, built to withstand the weather, have replaced faded older ones, displaying clear day-and-night messages on hazards and speed limits. Slow mobile links have been swapped for dedicated fibre connections, giving signs and equipment an instant, reliable line to the HORUS control room. Inside the tunnels themselves, cameras now monitor escape routes, lane lights guide or block traffic at entrances, and backup power keeps everything running through outages, all coordinated by smart controllers reporting into the same platform.

The results reported so far are substantial. Detection times have improved by around 12 seconds, keeping more vehicles from entering tunnels where an incident is already unfolding. Queues caused by incidents have been cut by roughly 50%, freeing up more than 10,000 vehicle-hours a year and accident risk inside the tunnels is expected to fall by around 1.5 crashes annually.