Cordel Group PLC announced it has been awarded a contracts to deliver a LiDAR-based solution in Mexico in partnership with Holland LP and a further project with the National Transport Research Organisation in Australia, in partnership with Ricardo PLC. The contract in Mexico expands on the success of Cordel & Holland's partnership announced on 23 February 2023 and is the Company's first contract under the new commercial model between the companies. In this case, rather than mounting a Cordel scanner on a Holland track vehicle for a single network scan, the customer is purchasing one of Holland's industry leading inspection vehicles with a permanently mounted Cordel LiDAR unit.

The LiDAR scanner will run autonomously while the railroad is conducting its regular inspections. Cordel and Holland will provide the railroad with a digital twin of the new network, along with reports for various engineering use cases. The second contract win is an AUD 500,000 project for Level Crossing Safety Research, which is in addition to the agreement with NTRO announced on 4 September 2023.

Cordel will provide technical competency in relation to data capture at large scale and using automation to extract attributes of interest from level crossings using multi-modal data sets. This has been awarded under round 1 of the Regional Australia Level Crossing Safety Program, a AUD 180.1 million government program which aims to improve level crossing safety in regional areas. Cordel will create a web-based Level Crossing Data management Portal that will expose critical information to the various stakeholders.

Significant contribution will be made by Ricardo to engage the compliance related stakeholders, and from NTRO in relation to ongoing alignment with its other research in this field. The feedback obtained from these initiatives will complement future funding rounds which NTRO and Department of Transport (Vic) are currently under discussion for FY24/25 and beyond.