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Towards the future-proofing of UK infrastructure


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Authors

Parlikad, Ajith Kumar 
Dora, John 
Ellis, Andrew 

Abstract

jats:p Ensuring long-term performance from key infrastructure is essential to enable it to serve society and to maintain a sustainable economy. The future-proofing of key infrastructure involves addressing two broad issues: (i) resilience to unexpected or uncontrollable events (e.g., extreme weather events); (ii) adaptability to required changes in structure and/or operations of the infrastructure in the future. Increasingly, infrastructure owners, designers, builders, governments and operators are being required to consider possible future challenges as part of the life cycle planning for assets and systems that make up key infrastructure. A preliminary study is reported here that aimed at exploring the following questions related to infrastructure (systems): what does ‘future-proofing’ of infrastructural assets mean? Why and when should critical infrastructure be future-proofed? How can infrastructure assets (systems) be prepared for uncertain future events? How can future-proofing considerations be incorporated into infrastructure asset management practices? To seek answers to the above questions, two industrial workshops were conducted that brought together leading practitioners in the UK infrastructure and construction sectors, along with government policymakers. This paper captures lessons learnt from the workshops and proposes a framework for linking future-proofing into asset management considerations. Case studies of Dawlish railway and Heathrow airport are also presented. </jats:p>

Description

Keywords

infrastructure planning, management, uncertainty, reliability & risk

Journal Title

Infrastructure Asset Management

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

2053-0242
2053-0250

Volume Title

3

Publisher

Thomas Telford Ltd.
Sponsorship
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/K000314/1)
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/L010917/1)
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/I019308/1)
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/N021614/1)
The authors would like to acknowledge the Centre for Smart Infrastructure & Construction, EPSRC (Grant EP/K000314/1), Innovate UK and the industrial partners, which collectively funded this project. The authors are thankful to the CSIC industrial partners involved in the futureproofing project. The authors are also thankful to the speakers and delegates from London Underground, Costain, UCL, IBM, Crossrail, John Dora Consulting, Heathrow, Cementation Skanska, CIRIA, Network Rail, Arup, Highways Agency, Atkins, Halcrow/CH2M, Lang O’ Rourke, Lend Lease, Infrastructure UK, Committee on Climate Change and CSIC, who attended the CSIC workshop(s) on infrastructure futureproofing. The authors are also thankful to the following companies who responded to our questionnaire on futureproofing strategies for industrial assets and systems: ABB, BAE Systems, Boeing, Caterpillar, EA Technology, Exxon Mobil, Finning, Hitachi, IBM and Rolls-Royce.