Innovation strategies aiming to improve urban life and development must address the pillars of urban areas: their infrastructural system. In Europe, about 80% of the road network consists of asphalt pavements, requiring more than 275 million tons of asphalt mixture to be produced every year. The negative impact of this production in terms of fossil energy, air quality and resource depletion is immense. If we are to take great leaps towards a sustainable infrastructure this challenge must be addressed.
Several tools have been developed to establish a method to evaluate the carbon emission related to the life cycle of road pavements.
However, the complexity associated with the extension of the urban network hinders the development of a practical and standardized assessment method. To fulfill this goal, HERMES suggest an approach based on the assessment of the overall sustainability of the road pavements combined with a management system able to disentangle the challenges due to the administration of a vast network. The aim of this project is therefore to develop an integrated evaluation system and management policy able to assess the appropriate maintenance strategy of the urban road system based on energy efficiency, emission reduction potential.
