Today, Maxar congratulates its customer, Agilysis, for winning the 2022 Prince Michael International Road Safety Award. This award recognizes outstanding achievement and innovations in road safety worldwide. Each year, His Royal Highness Prince Michael of Kent, a member of the British royal family, gives public recognition through this award to the most outstanding examples of international road safety initiatives.
Agilysis, which has more than a decade of expertise in transport safety, is establishing and monitoring key performance indicators to benchmark road safety conditions. Supported by a research and development grant from The World Bank to advance this framework in an innovative way, Agilysis turned to satellite imagery and worked with the International Road Assessment Programme (iRAP). It is this project that received the award.
Reducing transportation-related deaths is important: The World Health Organization reports 1.35 million people lose their lives annually while driving, cycling or walking on the road. Another 50 million are seriously injured. However, the rate of road traffic death is not equal across the world; for example, Africa and Southeast Asia have the highest rates.
Agilysis’ Winning Solution
Agilysis’ solution leverages Maxar’s Analysis-Ready Data (ARD) to extract 13 road attributes—including vehicle speed, traffic flow and road features—which are critical for measuring and monitoring road safety indicators. This information indicates where 75% of the road traffic occurs across Kenya and Ethiopia.
Agilysis uses Maxar’s ARD because it offers pre-processed satellite imagery stacks that increase the speed and efficiency of the analysis, fast-tracking the extraction of insights using machine learning approaches. Maxar’s ARD is atmospheric and radiometric corrected, orthorectified and aligned. These time-series stacks of imagery are calibrated and optimized for a cloud-based workflow. ARD also enables faster analysis of the imagery through automation. It is built on open standards and provides application programming interface (API) access to Maxar imagery.
The information extracted by Agilysis will be used by the African Road Safety Observatory (ARSO), an organization dedicated to bringing together government representatives and road safety experts across Africa to reduce fatalities on the road. ARSO will now be able to accurately measure and understand key road safety features, critical foundational information for creating safer environments.
Following the completion of the project in Summer 2022, Agilysis has already been approached to provide traffic data on four continents with outputs being used to help understand transport planning and road safety policy. Agilysis can be contacted via their website www.agilysis.co.uk.
Leverage ARD to expedite your workflows
Skip straight to analysis with pre-processed stacks of Maxar’s high-resolution satellite imagery.