Digi Rogaland is a regional collaboration between 20 Rogaland municipalities and Rogaland county municipality. The goal is that the new digital solutions will provide citizens, businesses and other social actors with better and more accessible municipal services. As part of school safety initiative, during 2022 and 2023, the municipalities of Sola, Sandnes, Gjesdal, Tysvær, Karmøy and Stavanger installed several IoT sensors on the municipalities’ roads. The data collected needed a modern data platform to produce insights and aid decision making. With the help of Microsoft partner Bouvet, the municipalities turned to Microsoft Fabric Real Time Intelligence to stand up a solution in quick order. The solution, which is already in production, will create safer school roads, while at the same time the municipalities will avoid excessive salting in winter, improving the longevity of the road network.

The sensors measure the number of vehicles passing, their speed, temperature and road conditions. 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. The results are presented through a Power BI report, which municipalities can use when planning salting in winter. Traffic patterns in a certain area around the schools are also mapped here. The data is used to identify any measures to make school roads even safer.

The previous architecture was based on bespoke product suite. The architecture in now replaced with Microsoft Fabric as end to end analytics platform, helping for easier maintenance at a lower cost. Key features and workloads of Fabric – pipelines for data ingestion, Realtime Intelligence (Event Streams, KQL), Notebooks, Data Science models and experiments for predictive analytics and Power BI for reporting.