The Proactive Infrastructure Monitoring and Evaluation (PRIME) System: Automating Decision-Support and Enabling Intelligent Earthworks Management

This project aims to develop a low cost ground imaging system (PRIME - Proactive Infrastructure Monitoring and Evaluation) for remote monitoring of infrastructure earthwork assets. PRIME will assess the condition of the earthworks on a continuous 24/7 basis, helping to predict failures and enable timely intervention. Conventional asset monitoring involves examining the surface (either by people on the ground or from aerial photos) and using point sensors, like moisture content and tilt meters, which only give information in the immediate vicinity of the sensor. But PRIME will use geophysics to 'see inside' the earthworks, enabling volumetric tracking of moisture content changes and ground movement, and so identifying problems at a much earlier stage.

The development of PRIME is driven by the increasing rate and severity of infrastructure earthwork failures. 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). 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 services, transport systems and the wider economy. There is growing recognition among asset owners, managers, and consultants that remote monitoring technologies have the potential to reduce these costs and risks by providing continuous condition information and early warnings of failure.

To this end, low-cost PRIME hardware has already been successfully developed and demonstrated during a pilot phase project. But in an operational environment, the processing and interpretation of the large volumes of data that PRIME will produce must be automated for the technology to be commercially viable. Manual oversight of the systems simply would not be able to deliver cost-effective near real-time condition assessments and early warnings over extended monitoring periods. To address this, the project aims to develop a fully-automated data processing, image analysis and decision support system for PRIME. Methods already used in medical physics will be employed to recognise conditions likely to give rise to failure and will automatically generate alarms. The near real-time interpretation of the earthwork condition will be provided by an end-user interface (the dashboard), which will also enable PRIME information to be exported to, and interface with, industry-standard monitoring systems. The system will be validated at two test sites on operational rail and waterways infrastructure, and its development will be steered by a broad consortium of stakeholders to ensure that the technology is fit-for-purpose.

Implementation of the PRIME information delivery system will represent a step-change in asset condition monitoring, providing high frequency subsurface information at unprecedented resolution. This will facilitate a powerful new approach to near-real-time decision-support and early warning, which will provide the information necessary to implement low-cost early interventions and avoid catastrophic very high cost infrastructure failures. Moreover, the development and commercialisation of PRIME will enable specialist consultants and technology companies to provide cutting edge services and monitoring solutions. By the end of the project, the aim is to have developed and demonstrated PRIME technology to a point where it is ready to be translated to the commercial sector.

Stakeholders: Arup; Atkins; Network Rail; Canal and River Trust; Scottish Canals; National Grid; HS2; Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB); ITM Monitoring; GeoSense; Transport Scotland.

Keywords: Remote monitoring; early warning; subsurface information; geophysical imaging; environmental risks; infrastructure condition.

The primary outcome will be a new decision support system and methodology for monitoring safety critical geotechnical assets, which will be proven to TRL 7, enabling a step-change in the way geotechnical assets are managed. This will benefit asset owners and managers by providing remotely monitored high spatial and temporal resolution information on the internal condition of geotechnical assets. It will be applicable to activities including; (1) monitoring high risk structures; (2) short term monitoring to determine whether intervention is required; and (3) monitoring to verify success of remedial activities. This will facilitate a proactive approach to asset management and positively impact business operation by identifying poor asset condition at an early stage (enabling low cost remediation), minimising unnecessary renewals, providing early warning of potential failure events, and reducing the need for people to enter potentially hazardous operational environments.

The potential commercial opportunity for stakeholders providing specialist monitoring technology and consultancy services is very substantial. The scale of the infrastructure asset portfolio is huge in the UK alone. For example, Network Rail has 20,000 km of embankments and cuttings (900 km of which is exhibiting actual/incipient failure) with £250 m/yr set aside for intelligent infrastructure capabilities; Canal and River Trust and Scottish Canals have 10,000 principal infrastructure assets many of which are >200 yrs old and require significant intervention or monitoring; HS2 will construct hundreds of geotechnical assets for which installation of monitoring technology during construction is proposed. In addition, PRIME will be applicable to transportation and utilities assets internationally, and in other market sectors, such as groundwater and contaminated land. Project partners will benefit from steering the development of the technology to ensure its applicability to their sector, and will be well-placed to become early adopters and providers of PRIME.