Digital Road Condition Monitoring – Predictive Infrastructure Maintenance Use Case

By Thomas Komenda, Kai Meinke & Albert Peci

deltaDAO AG is a German operating ecosystem and software development company. As an accredited Gaia-X Digital Clearing House provider and Gaia-X member, deltaDAO provides data economy services across various Gaia-X ecosystems, including manufacturing, mobility, agriculture, aerospace, the public sector, energy, and smart cities. deltaDAO is also the initiator of the Pontus-X Ecosystem, the largest publicly available X-Ecosystem.

This use case is part of the Gaia-X 4 Future Mobility (GX4FM) family of projects, supported by the German Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWk). GX4FM is considered a Gaia-X Lighthouse Project, with the digital road condition monitoring use case playing a key role in the GX4FM moveID project (‘Decentralised digital vehicle identities in the highly networked traffic environment’) and the GX4FM AMS project (‘Advanced Mobility Services for Autonomous Driving’).

🎧 Listen to the latest episode of Gaia-X Unclouded where Kai Meinke, Co-founder & Business Lead at deltaDAO AG and leader of the Gaia-X Open Source Software Community, discusses the Gaia-X 4FutureMobility use case. This project addresses the challenge of ageing mobility infrastructure in Germany, which poses economic and safety risks.

Overview of the Use Case

Main Stakeholders and Roles

• Peregrine Technologies GmbH – Collects infrastructure condition data in collaboration with the City of Hamburg and develops road damage detection software.
• City of Hamburg – Acts as the data consumer, using the data to enhance its digital twin of mobility infrastructure.
• deltaDAO AG – Provides infrastructure condition data, analysis software, and compute infrastructure for detecting and annotating infrastructure damage.

Pontus-X Ecosystem Operators (Federators) – Facilitate the federated base service of the ecosystem, including deltaDAO AG (Germany), PTW TU Darmstadt (Germany), Pilotfabrik TU Wien (Austria), WOBCOM GmbH (Germany), AIRBUS Defense and Space GmbH (Germany), and Neusta Aerospace GmbH (Germany).

Context & Challenges

Problem Addressed:

The deterioration of mobility infrastructure requires billions in annual investment, with German citizens and companies increasingly voicing concerns about road conditions. This leads to economic damage and dangerous driving conditions. Currently, road condition monitoring is inefficient and costly, with data collected by individual municipalities in isolated municipal systems without seamless collaboration.

Solution Overview

Key Features:

The vehicle data collection and road condition monitoring use case leverages a scalable data services ecosystem, based on Pontus-X, where data providers, software providers, infrastructure providers and consumers efficiently work together to exchange and combine mobility infrastructure data, AI applications for analysis and infrastructure for calculations – from the cloud to edge and IoT solutions. Data can be collected and analysed directly on the edge, i.e., by fleet owners and data collection specialists, and the results can be offered as a service to the consumers (here smart mobility providers and municipalities) that must deal with the mobility infrastructure and its condition.

• Data Collection & Edge Analysis – Fleet owners and specialists collect and analyse data directly on the edge, offering results as services to municipalities and smart mobility providers.
• Federation Services – The ecosystem provides services such as market, catalogue, contracting, and payment services, ensuring transparency and interoperability.
• Marketplaces & Portals – Portals such as Pontus-X Portal and moveID Portal enable users to publish, manage, discover, and consume services.
• Contracting & Payments – Uses smart contracts and digital EUROe for real-time transactions between participants.
• Logging & Data Sovereignty – Secure and immutable logs ensure privacy and compliance through Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs).
• Compute-to-Data – Allows data analysis without the need for direct transfers, enforcing strict usage policies.

Implementation

Integration into Existing Systems:

Integration is streamlined using Pontus-X marketplaces and nautilus agent. Only front-end and middleware components are required, with Ocean Enterprise Provider/Connector ensuring technical data sovereignty. Compliance is achieved through Gaia-X Trust Framework requirements.

End-User Benefits:

• Authorities and road construction firms can prioritise urgent repairs, reducing costs and improving safety.
• Mobility service providers can optimise route planning and hazard avoidance.
• Open competition encourages innovation, reducing costs and increasing efficiency.
• Standardised semantics ensure interoperability across stakeholders.
• Compute-to-Data protects sensitive data while enabling collaboration.
• Digital twins of infrastructure enhance data-driven decision-making.

Added Value Through Gaia-X

Alignment with Gaia-X Vision

The current architecture makes use of all Gaia-X federation services and the Trust Framework 22.10.

Technology Convergence Needs

The main and remaining convergence need is for the Gaia-X credential issuance, verification, and exchange mechanisms which shall be based on OpenID4VCI and OpenID4VP to be interoperable and reusable across all X-ecosystems. Additionally, the Gaia-X Trust Framework in the future accepts Elliptic Curves, and keys other than RSA key, as the basis for identities and for signing credentials to allow current battle-tested and widely used methods in the market.

Use Case Scaling

New Member Onboarding Requirements

New users, providers, or service providers must adhere to the Gaia-X Trust Framework and ecosystem terms. Entities with Gaia-X-compliant identities are invited to participate.

Potential Cross-Sector Applications

The resources are also very useful in logistics, maritime traffic and more generally in tourism, agriculture, smart cities and more. The applied technologies and software components, as reference implementations, are mostly sector agnostic and can be adapted to other use cases and domains.

Next Steps

• Transition to production infrastructure and the Loire (Gaia-X v2) GXDCH release.
• Expand analysis software for additional use cases.
• Enhance transparency regarding the Gaia-X Trust Framework and service composition.
• Further develop the Ocean Enterprise open-source software stack.
• Deepen integration with Gaia-X specifications to improve compliance and usability.

📖 Read the full use case here.