Lifting the smoke curtain with Trafsense

Erling Kolltveit | 17. January 2025

A tunnel filled by smoke from a fire is a very dangerous as well as a scary road scenario. The Trafsense® road monitoring system has been tested by the Norwegian Public Roads Administration and shown to provide precise and potentially life-saving emergency information on vehicles trapped in the smoke.

The view from inside a car trapped in artificial smoke during the Norwegian Public Roads Administration testing in the Lyderhorn tunnel on RV555 in Bergen, Norway. The tunnel wall is only 1.5 m away but completely hidden by the smoke.

Smoke from a tunnel fire will after a few minutes fill the cross section of the tunnel, blinding the video cameras. Vehicles entering the tunnel at normal speed will be engulfed by the smoke before coming to a halt. This is a frightful situation where the fiberoptic Trafsense® road monitoring system despite impenetrable smoke pinpoints the positions of all stopped vehicles within a standard deviation of 5.5 meters. This information may be critical for the emergency services in deciding the exact procedure to follow to minimize the human damages.

This concept was recently tested in the 1 115 m Lyderhorn tunnel on RV555 in Bergen (Norway) by using artificial smoke and test vehicles:

The intuitive playback function in Trafsense® reveals three stopped vehicles inside the smoke-filled part of the tunnel. The exact position of the red vehicle at 337 m is displayed when hovering the mouse marker above the icon. The tunnel diagram is split in two parts to fit the display format.

Observers from the Norwegian Public Roads Administration, different regional road traffic centres, from different county administrations, and automation contractors participated in the test. A pop-up road traffic centre was established in a lay-bay in the adjacent tunnel bore.

This test was done under a joint pilot project between Trafsys AS and the Norwegian Public Roads Administration. The project is partially funded by Innovation Norway under the Pilot-T innovation programme intended to accelerate the development of future transport systems with superior safety and efficiency, and reduced emissions.

Read more about our Trafsense® road monitoring system: Trafsense