UKCRIC - PLEXUS - Priming Laboratory EXperiments on infrastructure and Urban Systems

The UK Collaboratorium for Research on Infrastructure and Cities (UKCRIC) is, with a (matched) capital investment of £138m from BEIS, creating world-class city observatory, modelling & simulation and physical laboratory facilities. The UKCRIC Laboratories will form the state-of-the-art, world class, national research infrastructure that UK academic researchers and infrastructure providers need if they are to deliver world leading infrastructure provision and performance. UKCRIC's overall mission is to move away from the traditional, somewhat siloed, academic and industry viewpoints, which all stakeholders now increasingly recognise is a major barrier to innovation and to the radical changes in infrastructure provision practice that are needed to tackle the huge scale of the UK and global infrastructure renewal challenge.

This proposal from UKCRIC's Laboratories Strand aims to prepare for and use UKCRIC's laboratory facilities for the ultimate purpose of developing UKCRIC's research staff capacity & capability, and create a Common Vision, Strategic Research Agenda & Implementation Action Plan for the Laboratories Strand via three expansive yet interlinked critical technical challenges.

It meets EPSRC's objectives of encouraging new collaborations; demonstrating cross institution-theme-facility working central to the UKCRIC vision; contributing to the benefits as set out in the UKCRIC Business Case; & delivering research aligning with the outcomes from UKCRIC's workshops.

Three important and urgent technical challenges will contextualise the research:
(1) intense physical interdependency of urban infrastructure systems, each of which relies on ground support;
(2) harvesting energy from buried infrastructure systems; and,
(3) accelerated deterioration of infrastructure materials due to extreme loading.

The challenges are synergistic, having been identified by industry as high added-value problems offering quick-win outcomes.

Exploration of these challenges will inform learning capture and be translated into the Vision, Research Agenda & Implementation Action Plan.

PLEXUS will enable academics and industry stakeholders to co-produce and test the essential collaborative frameworks that will underpin the success of the overall UKCRIC enterprise. This integrated view will help drive progress towards the more integrated and holistic sector mindset that must underpin transformative thinking and practice in infrastructure provision.

The UKCRIC Laboratories will form the state-of-the-art, world class, national research infrastructure that UK academic researchers and infrastructure providers need if they are to deliver world-leading infrastructure provision and performance.

UKCRIC aims to move away from the traditional, somewhat siloed, academic and industry viewpoints, which all stakeholders now increasingly recognise is a major barrier to innovation and to the radical changes in infrastructure provision practice that are needed to tackle the huge scale of the UK and global infrastructure renewal challenge. UKCRIC sees itself long term as a single, unified infrastructure community, embracing academics, industry, policy makers, financiers and, crucially, citizens as the ultimate beneficiaries.

PLEXUS will enable academics and industry stakeholders to co-produce and test the essential collaborative frameworks that will underpin the success of the overall UKCRIC enterprise. This will be done through exploring exemplar high added-value infrastructure problems that industry and infrastructure stakeholders have identified. These exemplars will form the contextual setting for understanding the learning that has to be connected from fundamental blue skies research through to actual infrastructure delivery. This integrated view will help drive progress towards the more integrated and holistic sector mindset that must underpin transformative thinking and practice in infrastructure provision.

PLEXUS will develop long-term research and development route maps that will help articulate the co-produced value propositions for addressing high-value uncertainties. The route maps will identify the strands of knowledge creation and capability development that must be integrated in order to realise the value propositions. These strands will be mapped onto tentative projects that draw the requisite expertise together to achieve the desired outcomes.

The main impacts of PLEXUS can be summarised as:
- Framing and driving change in the mindset and practices of the infrastructure community with the intended outcome of delivering more innovative, cost effective, sustainable and resilient infrastructure that underpins the UK economy and the well-being of citizens.
- Generating example narratives on how UKCRIC laboratories can be developed and used to support this change through addressing exemplar, high added-value infrastructure problems.
- Mapping out a long term research and development route map that will locate and bind together the contributions of individual stakeholders and groups so that the integrated community is able to deliver far more than the sum of its parts.