Digi Rogaland prioritizes student safety with Bouvet and Microsoft Fabric

Digi Rogaland is a regional collaboration between 20 Rogaland municipalities and Rogaland County Municipality in Western Norway. It ensures that the region's residents have access to digital solutions regardless of their municipality.

Through their work, Digi Rogaland realized they lacked competence in digitalization, Internet of Things (IoT), and a secure data platform within the different municipalities. Now, they have a secure data platform including IoT that can track when roads need salting and are safe for use.

Cracks in the surface

To receive the services needed for digital transformation for safer municipalities, Digi Rogaland needed to partner with an organization that understood its immediate needs.

Bouvet is a leading Norwegian consulting company that provides information technology, digital communication, and business management services. Bouvet realized the technology problem in municipalities needed to be addressed while creating sustainable avenues for long-term impact. It aims to help customers develop, manage, and improve solutions that help them achieve their goals and create value for society. Its customer, Digi Rogaland, found this useful when it was time to upgrade their digital platform.

Finding the potholes

Before this initiative, winter road maintenance relied heavily on salt and other chemicals which proved to be unsustainable and environmentally damaging. Digi Rogaland recognized the need for a better solution, so it turned to the potential of digitalization, IoT, and advanced data platforms to revolutionize their approach. The challenge was to harness the vast amount of data into a sophisticated platform to generate meaningful insights.

Digi Rogaland found the ideal partner in Bouvet. It brought the necessary experience and vision to help Digi Rogaland achieve its goals and create a more sustainable and efficient system for winter road maintenance.

Alleviating the cracks

Microsoft Azure was initially chosen because it aligned seamlessly with the existing technology stack used by the municipalities, all of which are Microsoft-based. This made Microsoft Azure an easy fit. Bouvet’s consultants, with their deep understanding of the Microsoft ecosystem, leveraged their status as a specialized partner and an early adopter of Microsoft Fabric to access the latest features, offering Digi Rogaland a significant advantage. In an early pilot project, Bouvet transitioned Digi Rogaland’s solution to Microsoft Fabric, successfully exploring new features and achieving lower operational costs.

Bouvet integrated the solution with Eventstream, Noteboks, and data flow. Sensor data is written to both a Lakehouse and a KQL database. Microsoft Fabric also helped to store large amounts of data and analyze stored data to build real insights for Digi Rogaland.

The IoT sensors measure the number of vehicles passing, their speed, temperature, and road conditions. The IoT sensor data is collected from an API provided by the vendor for the sensors. The data from the sensors is loaded into the climate platform in real-time. Here the data is collated with data from open services such as the Norwegian Road Administration and weather data. This data is then gathered for reporting.

The reports play a crucial role in planning winter maintenance. Administrators responsible for routing trucks that distribute salt will follow a predetermined path. By utilizing the report to monitor road conditions, planners can assess how salting impacts the roads. Additionally, the reports provide the municipality with data on traffic volume and vehicle speeds during school drop-off and pick-up times throughout the year. In collaboration with the road administration, they can implement measures to reduce traffic, inevitably making school roads safer.

Smoother roads

Microsoft Fabric is now Digi Rogaland’s end-to-end analytics platform.The total operating costs of the solutions are significantly lower than the previous solution and are easier to maintain.

Digi Rogaland ensures safer school roads and avoids excessive salting in winter, improving the longevity of the road network.

Microsoft Fabric has opened a lot of possibilities for both Bouvet and Digi Rogaland and allowed access and knowledge from Microsoft experts along the way.

Safer drives ahead

Together, Microsoft Fabric, Bouvet, andDigi Rogaland use eco-friendly solutions that are sustainable for the long-term. They also plan to build out the climate platform.

Bouvet is actively exploring additional ways to advance the Digi Rogaland solution. The recognition it has received has opened opportunities for new customers and potential real-time analytics.

“Digi Rogaland, Smart City, and the municipalities of Rogaland have for several years tested out IoT solutions and how this can create added value for the citizens, the business sector, and the municipalities in the region. Bouvet has been central in this work and has now really challenged us with how we can use the latest technological solutions," said Rune Hauge, Director of Digi Rogaland.