Sweden’s critical infrastructure — roads, railways, bridges, power lines, and communication networks — forms the backbone of both everyday society and national defence. Disruptions caused by extreme weather, landslides, flooding, or deliberate interference can cascade rapidly, cutting off communities, delaying emergency response, and compromising military mobility. Trafikverket, responsible for the national road and rail network, faces the challenge of monitoring vast distances of infrastructure across diverse and often remote terrain.
In this challenge, teams could develop solutions for detecting changes, anomalies, or damage to roads, railways, and other critical infrastructure. By combining satellite imagery from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 with national infrastructure registers, elevation models, and land cover data, participants can build prototypes such as:
- Change detection systems that identify new disruptions along transport corridors — such as landslides, subsidence, or flood damage — by comparing satellite passes over time
- Risk prioritisation maps that combine exposure data (proximity to water, slope instability, soil conditions) with infrastructure criticality to highlight the most vulnerable segments
- Rapid damage assessment tools that overlay detected changes on infrastructure registers to estimate which roads, rail links, or facilities are affected and their importance to the wider network
- Operational dashboards for decision-makers at Trafikverket, county administrative boards, and civil defence coordinators to support fast, informed response during disruptions
Trafikverket manages over 98,000 kilometres of road and nearly 14,000 kilometres of railway across Sweden. Satellite-based monitoring offers the potential to complement ground-based inspections with broad, repeatable coverage — enabling earlier detection of emerging risks and faster situational awareness when disruptions occur. This capability is equally relevant for total defence planning, where maintaining transport functionality is essential for military logistics, evacuation, and supply chain continuity.
The goal could be to show how satellite data and AI can shift infrastructure monitoring from scheduled inspections and reactive reporting towards continuous, wide-area surveillance — supporting both routine maintenance decisions and rapid crisis response.