Future Resilient Transport Networks - FUTURENET

Lead Research Organisation: Transport Research Laboratory (United Kingdom)
Department Name: C4S

Abstract

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Description FUTURENET (Future Resilient Transport Systems) is a project sponsored by EPSRC as part of the Adaptation and Resilience to Climate Change (ARCC) programme. It is led by the University of Birmingham, in partnership with the Universities of Loughborough and Nottingham, TRL, HR Limited and the British Geological Survey. It seeks to understand and quantify the resilience of the UK transport system under extreme weather conditions, and to assess the likely change in resilience due to future changes in climate, with the aim to produce outline methodologies that could be used by transport infrastructure operators and policy makers to develop business plans for future system developments, and to increase the resilience of specific parts of the network or complete routes to extreme weather conditions.



The project effectively approaches the issue of resilience from a number of viewpoints. At a high level it takes the viewpoint of the policy maker / senior infrastructure operator, who is concerned about the performance of the whole network. At a local level the viewpoint is that of a local infrastructure manager who is concerned with the long term maintenance and resilience of individual sections of road or track, bridge or tunnel etc. The other viewpoint, which is all too often ignored, is that of the traveller on a specific journey at a specific time. The requirements in terms of resilience are very different from the three viewpoints. For example the policy maker would wish to ensure that the economic life of the country / region is not affected by transport network failure and necessarily takes the broad view. The local infrastructure manager is concerned to ensure that failure of a road or rail link or structure does not occur and suitable maintenance practices are in place. The traveller is simply concerned with a specific journey - that he or she should reach his destination safely and without undue delay. These considerations led the project team to adopt the following definition of resilience.



Resilience is the ability to provide and maintain an acceptable level of service in the face of challenges to normal operation



What is an "acceptable level of service" is thus very dependent upon a particular stakeholder's needs and requirements.



The basic approach taken by the project team has been to build an integrated framework to model system behaviour for a range of climatic variables at the local and the route level, which integrates stakeholder policy and commercial drivers, socio-economic considerations, traveller preferences with climate models and weather predictions and engineering models of specific climatic effects on road and rail transport, and to use this framework for a consideration of the resilience of the network under different climate scenarios. Specifically the project has the following components.



• The identification of a specific route to be used as the case study for the project. An evaluation of a number of routes led to the choice of the London to Glasgow corridor for the study, as this is economically important, is served by a variety of transport modes, and passes through a number of different climate regions.

• The development of a model framework in the CORE systems engineering architecture.

• A methodology for the development of social and transport scenarios to use in the model framework, that draw upon social scenario development and a thorough study of current and likely future stakeholder requirements.

• The inclusion within the model framework of traveller choices and perspectives, which were obtained from a major travel survey of the London-Glasgow route.

• The development of a number of specific physical process models to predict resilience, in terms of loss of capacity and route closure, of specific route sections , for example

- landslip models;

- pluvial and fluvial flood models;

- bridge scour models;

- track buckling models.

• The generation of weather time series for use with these physical process models that encompass the range of climatic variables of relevance to the specific situations.

• The generation of weather time series models for the complete route, based on the UKCP09 climate scenarios and the UKCP09 weather generator.

• The integration of the physical process models and the generated weather events to enable the resilience of an individual journey from London to Glasgow to be calculated in terms of the overall probability of delay or failure of the journey.

• The use of the integrated model framework to investigate the effect of potential changes in climate on probability of journey failure.



A number of issues arose in the development of the model framework that have broad implications. These are as follows.



• It became clear during the course of the project that the quality of the data that is held concerning asset location and condition and network performance is very variable across the road and rail networks, and in many instances is not fit for the proper determination of local, regional and national resilience. This issue could be addressed by a more systematic approach to the collection of certain essential data in a more systematic way.

• The integration of local physical process models into large scale network based models is far from straightforward.

• The UKCP09 weather generator produces weather time series for specific 5km squares, but does not produce the correct spatial correlation between adjacent squares. For the route modelling that was carried out in FUTURENET, which is at a national scale, the weather was generated at one square and the various parameters scaled for other parts of the country using empirical scaling factors. The inadequacy of this approach is accepted, and more work is required by the meteorological community to produce weather time series with correct spatial correlations. This is of importance not just for transport networks, but also for the study of other large scale networks such as power supply systems.
Exploitation Route Primary use is non-academic - for policy-makers, infrastructure managers and travellers as outlined above. The main outputs from the work are of interest to, and can be exploited by a number of different stakeholder groups. These include the following.



• An outline methodology for the determination of the resilience of large scale transport networks, from the point of view of traveller experience, and a quantitative indication of how this resilience may vary in future climate scenarios. This methodology can, in principle, be applied to any specific route as required, and can be used to inform policy and development plans.

• A suite of physical process models for different weather related effects on transport networks, which will be of use to infrastructure managers in developing operation and maintenance plans for their assets.

• A methodology for describing travel delays due to weather conditions that can be used to develop traveller information systems.
Sectors Environment,Transport
URL http://www.arcc-network.org.uk/project-summaries/futurenet/#.Vsyx89LcsdU
 
Description The outcomes have been used as part of the evidence bas of, and the justifications of further work in national infrastructure asset owners (Network Rail especially) adaptation plans.
First Year Of Impact 2013
Sector Transport
Impact Types Economic,Policy & public services
 
Description Collaboration with the Highways Agency 
Organisation Department of Transport
Department Highways Agency
Country United Kingdom 
Sector Public 
PI Contribution the Highways Agency has contributed to project design/planning , has provided access to research data and study sites, provided information as research subjects, assisted in data collection and is giving feedback on findings
Start Year 2009
 
Description Network Rail 
Organisation Network Rail Ltd
Country United Kingdom 
Sector Private 
PI Contribution Network Rail has supplied data and has provided input for the direction of the project, as well as receiving its outputs
Start Year 2009