Mercabarna uses 5G technology to improve road safety in the facility

Some 14,000 vehicles access Mercabarna every day, moving through a large space equivalent to 90 football fields. Most of these vehicles are trailers, trucks, and vans, which also coexist with a thousand mechanical bulls that constantly circulate through the facilities, carrying fresh products from one place to another. Bicycles also come into play, used by a hundred professional buyers to move quickly through the wholesale markets. Mercabarna, which functions almost like a small city with a lot of traffic, wants to improve its road safety using 5G technology.

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The pilot project 5G Anti Collision uses latest-generation telephone networks and different advanced communication and localization technologies to track vehicles that cross paths in Mercabarna and prevent them from colliding. The wholesale market carried out a system test this Thursday with a forklift and a bicycle that were about to collide, an accident that was avoided by the emission of a warning signal.

Both the bull and the bicycle carried a device connected to the 5G network that allowed constant sending and receiving of messages in milliseconds, and another to precisely geolocate them, according to their position, acceleration, rotation, and distance between them. When the system detected danger in the cyclist's trajectory, a horn sounded, notifying one of the two of the imminent danger.

It is part of the 5G Barcelona initiative

The food complex thus becomes a 5G testbed in Catalonia with this project, framed within the 5G Barcelona initiative and driven by Mercabarna. It has partners such as Orange, Mobile World Capital Barcelona (MWCapital), Fundació i2CAT, and the Telecommunications Technology Centre of Catalonia (CTTC), in addition to the support of the Department of Digital Policies and Public Administration of the Generalitat.

The pilot was presented this morning by the Minister of Digital Policies, Jordi Puigneró; the president of Mercabarna and councilor for Commerce, Markets, Consumption, Internal Regime and Finance of the Barcelona City Council, Montserrat Ballarín; the director of the 5G Program of MWCapital and CEO of 5G Barcelona, Eduard Martín, and the territorial director of Catalonia for Large Companies of Orange, Víctor Vera. Representatives of the i2CAT Foundation and the CTTC, responsible for the technologies applied to the pilot test, also attended the event.

In the presentation, Martín pointed out that this pilot test demonstrates the "great capacity" that the 5G network offers in the field of logistics. "The application of these technologies in industrial vehicles will increase occupational safety, will facilitate the improvement and automation of processes and the efficiency of these operations," he stressed.