Physical services
Overview
Macq, a Belgian company with over a century of experience in the sector, has spent decades supplying municipal authorities, police departments and road operators with sensors, cameras and analytics platforms for traffic and public safety management. Looking to strengthen its AI capabilities, Macq turned to CitCom.ai, the European Testing and Experimentation Facility for AI and robotics solutions in Smart Cities and Communities, and worked through its Northern Supernode with DOLL Living Lab, a mobility test infrastructure based in Albertslund, Denmark, to trial its technology under real-world conditions.
Impact
The technology has already received regulatory approval in Belgium and Lithuania, and Macq is pursuing homologation in Austria, Poland, Slovenia and Switzerland. Coppieters noted that the collaboration with DOLL and CitCom.ai has helped Macq strengthen its position within the smart mobility ecosystem and broaden its market reach, building on 25 years of experience in the mobility sector. The trial demonstrates how testing environments such as CitCom.ai's can help established technology providers validate new combinations of AI and sensor data before wider market rollout, supporting the case for adopting section monitoring and multi-source data fusion as tools for safer, lower-emission urban roads.
The Challenge
Municipalities and road authorities increasingly need more than raw sensor readings: they need combined, actionable insight into how vehicles move through a city, in order to plan for safety and reduce environmental impact. Macq's existing camera systems already captured detailed data, but the company wanted to test whether merging camera output with independent environmental sensor readings could deliver a more complete and reliable picture, and whether this fused data could support a genuinely deterrent approach to speeding rather than sporadic spot fines.
The Solution
Through the CitCom.ai partnership, Macq tested the fusion of data from two of its own technologies: the QCAM camera system and Qsense-Air, an environmental sensor. Deployed together at DOLL Living Lab, the combined system was able to analyse a wide range of conditions in a given area, from air quality and weather to vehicle type, speed, traffic flow, and behavioural details such as mobile phone use or seatbelt-wearing by front-seat passengers. A central element of the trial was section monitoring: measuring a vehicle's average speed between two fixed points on a road, rather than relying on a single-point spot check. According to Macq account manager Jean-François Coppieters, the aim was to give municipalities a tool for genuine behavioural change, rather than what he described as a "spot fine cash cow." The system was also tested for its ability to predict traffic scenarios, including estimating the likelihood of traffic spilling over onto smaller roads even where direct sensor data was unavailable.
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