The Proactive Infrastructure Monitoring and Evaluation System (PRIME): Enabling Intelligent Earthworks Management

Project Partners: Arup, Atkins, Canal & River Trust, Environment Agency, Geosense, High Speed Two, Highways England, ITM Monitoring, Kier, National Grid, Network Rail, Rail Safety & Standards Board, Scottish Canals, Transport Scotland.

The Challenge: The development of the Proactive Infrastructure Monitoring and Evaluation (PRIME) system is driven by the increasing rate and severity of failures in flood defence, transportation, and utilities earthworks. This is due to aging assets (many canal and rail earthworks are over a hundred years old) and more extreme weather events (e.g. the extreme rainfall during winter 2013-14 & 2015-16). Asset failures are enormously expensive, costing hundreds of millions of pounds per year in the UK alone, not to mention risks to human health and disruption of transport systems, utilities and the wider economy. Assessment of the condition of geotechnical assets is essential for cost effective maintenance and prevention of hazardous failure events. Early identification of deteriorating condition generally allows low cost preventative remediation to be undertaken (post failure interventions are typically ten times more expensive) and reduces the risk of catastrophic failures. Conventional approaches to condition monitoring are often inadequate for predicting earthwork instability. They are heavily dependent on surface observations - i.e. walk-over surveys or airborne data collection. These approaches cannot detect the subsurface precursors to failure events; instead they identify failure once it has begun. There is growing recognition among infrastructure asset owners, managers, and consultants that automated monitoring technologies have the potential to reduce these costs and risks by providing continuous condition information and early warnings of failure.

Aims & Objectives: The primary objective is to deliver a new remote condition monitoring and decision-support system for assessing the internal condition of safety critical geotechnical assets. This will be realised by implementing a fully automated software workflow for data analysis and information delivery, building upon the recently developed PRIME hardware platform. The integrated PRIME system (i.e. hardware & software) will combine emerging geophysical ground imaging technology with wireless telemetry, 'big data' handling, and web portal access. It will form the basis of a new generation of intelligent decision-support technology capable of 'seeing inside' vulnerable earthworks in near-real-time using diagnostic imaging methods routinely used in medical physics. By the end of this project, the software and hardware will be demonstrated to technology readiness level (TRL) 7 at new and existing stakeholder sites, ready for commercialisation and use by the wider stakeholder community.

Benefits: The key benefits of PRIME to asset owners include cost savings through minimising unnecessary renewals and providing early warning of failure events, time savings associated with fewer manual site visits, and risk reduction by preventing dangerous earthworks failures, and minimising the need for people to enter potentially hazardous operational environments. Geotechnical monitoring providers, consultants & contractors will benefit through new cutting-edge geotechnical monitoring services and, for the first time, near-real-time volumetric subsurface monitoring information.

Key Deliverables & Outputs:
- New software to fully automate PRIME data processing and information delivery - including a web-based decision support dashboard.
- Demonstration of the complete PRIME system at existing rail and waterways pilot sites, and new highways, power transmission and flood defence sites - establishing TRL 7 (demonstration in an operational environment).
- A commercialisation strategy agreed with project partners to ensure technology translation to the stakeholder community.

Duration: 18 months

Cost: £183,000 (at 80% FEC)

Impact will be achieved through delivery of state-of-the-art low-cost remote subsurface monitoring technology to project partners. This will provide near-real-time operationally relevant asset condition information and early warning of poor earthwork condition and potential failure events.

Outcomes and change to current practice: The primary outcome will be a new decision support approach for monitoring safety critical geotechnical assets. This will be realised by producing a fully automated software workflow for data analysis and information delivery, building upon the recently developed PRIME hardware platform. By the end of this project, the software and hardware will be demonstrated to technology readiness level (TRL) 7, proven at new and existing stakeholder sites, and ready for commercialisation and use by the wider stakeholder community. The availability of low-cost PRIME technology will enable a step-change in practice towards proactive asset management, reducing the current dependency on manual site visits and surface inspections. Specifically, our stakeholder partners have identified that PRIME would be used for targeted site or asset scale monitoring activities including: (1) long term monitoring of high risk or critically important structures (e.g. at major transportation junctions, confluences or interchanges); (2) short term monitoring to determine whether intervention is required; and (3) monitoring to verify the success of remedial activities.

Benefits: The key benefits of PRIME to asset owners include cost savings through minimising unnecessary renewals and providing early warning of failure events, time savings associated with fewer manual site visits, and risk reduction by preventing dangerous earthworks failures and minimising the need for people to enter potentially hazardous operational environments. Geotechnical monitoring providers, consultants and contractors will benefit through new cutting-edge geotechnical monitoring services that incorporate, for the first time, high-resolution volumetric subsurface monitoring information. (See letters of support for further evidence).