Salvaging cars on time

Traffic jams cause a lot of financial damage, which is why damaged cars must be removed from the road as quickly as possible after an incident. The SIMN (Incident Management Foundation Netherlands) is responsible for these operations and typically enters into 3-year contracts with salvage companies. The LCM (National Central Hotline) - currently managed by insurance company Allianz - handles the incidents. Salvage companies are obliged to remove cars within one hour after the LCM reports the incident. The SIMN wants to monitor whether this is done properly and asked Geodan for an automated monitoring system.

In order to calculate whether a salvaging company is doing its work on time, Geodan combines the time of the manually entered LCM reports with the incident location and the automatically transmitted position and status of recovery vehicles in a smart algorithm. That system is called AIM: Aanrijdtijdensysteem Incident Management (Arrival time system Incident Management). The accompanying application Bergerview (Salvageview) visualizes on a map where the salvage vehicles are located and whether they’re stationary, driving, or hoisting. Salvagers can follow their organization’s vehicles on the road using a mobile app. Back at the office, the accompanying webapp is more convenient. The LCM emergency center receives the location of every company’s salvaging vehicles and projects them onto the wall.

Thanks to AIM and Bergerview, the SIMN (Incident Management Foundation Netherlands) and the LCM can handle and monitor 100,000 incidents per year using 500 salvage vehicles. There are also extra features, such as the ability to playback and analyze the handling of previous incidents, for instance. Thanks to regular updates of data such as background maps and road databases, the system remains up-to-date. With optimizations and expansions, the information position of salvaging companies is continuously being improved, which is important, because their duties keep growing.