Supporting Sustainable Transport Infrastructure Maintenance (Research In the Wild)

Helping to address the sustainability agenda through informed personal travel has been an area of intense research activity with many new forms of information collection and dissemination having been investigated. Much less well studied is the problem of maintaining the transport infrastructure in a sustainable fashion. In our work we wish to explore in the wild how new developments in travel information gathering and dissemination can be used to drive more sustainable approaches to maintaining the UK's transport infrastructure. The project builds on successful collaborations established through funded research projects (Our Travel (TSB), Faith (TSB/EPSRC), Smart Streets (TSB)) and looks to test in the wild ideas emerging from new areas of academic research as typified by the RCUK funded Sixth Sense Transport project.

Our work builds on two recent research projects, i.e. Our Travel and Sixth Sense. Within the Our Travel project the consortium have shown how crowd-sourced transport information can be integrated with highways maintenance activities to help better coordinate work activities and to ensure timely dissemination of information regarding maintenance activities to travellers. The on-going Sixth Sense Transport project is a multidisciplinary academic research project involving the Universities of Southampton (transport), Edinburgh (design), Salford (psychology) and Bournemouth (tourism) that is looking to encourage travellers to adopt a more sustainable approach to travel. To this end the project is developing applications that allow travellers to see predictions of future travel patterns of other users, enabling them to avoid congestion and make more opportunistic use of travel links, particularly across transport modes and between travellers. For example, the project looks to encourage travellers to identify opportunities for shared travel, convert single-purpose trips into multi-purpose trips, engage in collaborative logistics and shift to mixed-mode transport by providing simple interactive maps that show traces of both past and future travel patterns.

Our interest is in exploring whether the idea of using such predictive travel patterns can help provide a more sustainable approach to maintaining the UK's transport infrastructure. At present many highways maintenance activities are driven largely by a need to comply with contractual KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). This tends to lead to an inherently unsustainable "earliest deadline first" approach to scheduling that significantly increases the environmental overhead associated with highways maintenance. Prediction of future travel patterns may help in two distinct ways. Firstly, by enabling highways maintenance engineers to predict future travel patterns they can schedule work in a way that minimises traffic disruption - particularly with respect to journeys that involve multiple transport modes (e.g. driving to the station to catch a train). This can lead to a significant reduction in congestion and associated emissions. Secondly, by predicting future travel patterns of their own maintenance vehicles highways maintenance engineers can maximise the potential for opportunistic improvements to work-flows. For example, it may be possible to identify opportunities for maintenance operatives to opportunistically share tools and materials such as tarmac without the need to return to base between road repairs - reducing transport costs and environmental impact. More generally, in this research we are looking to enable a shift from a reactive, and distinctly inefficient and environmentally costly model of scheduling to a predictive, opportunistic model that looks to minimise the environmental impact of work.

Our proposal is for a collaborative project involving Lancaster University, In Touch Ltd. and Carillion plc. The project is designed to test ideas emerging from funded RCUK research by Lancaster University in the context of real world environments provided by In Touch Ltd. and Carillion plc. The project is designed to provide a mix of readily exploitable results with clear commercial pathways to impact and more highly speculative, high-risk, high-payoff work items that have the potential to transform activities in the area of infrastructure maintenance.

If the project is successful and demonstrates that through the use of new technologies highways maintenance activities can conducted in a more sustainable manner then the impact on both the industry sector and the country as a whole could be extremely significant. In particular, the project has the potential to deliver significant economic and environmental savings by reducing congestion caused by roadworks and by enabling contractors to carry out the work more efficiently.

Through the involvement of potential users of our research results, both in the form of a company that could directly exploit the work and a major end-user of a resulting software system we have a direct pathway to market for our work. Equally importantly, these partners provide us with a ready vehicle for ensuring the impact of our work is visible within the broader market sector. In particular, we note that the bid-oriented nature of the highways sector provides the potential for rapid uptake of new developments on a national scale.