Public Funding for Costain Group PLC

Over the next few years, the construction sector will witness a wave of infrastructure projects (£60 billion of spend each year over the next decade) and ground work will be undertaken to set future financial settlements. The pace of this growth, and the size of this opportunity, demands a construction sector that is the best in the world. To maximise the opportunities to drive efficiency savings across the delivery of the transport infrastructure pipeline, this proposal brings together key UK Transport Client groups, Suppliers and academic experts to establish a Transport Infrastructure Efficiency 'Living Lab' to build capability within delivery, innovation and managing construction risk. The UK has had a modest track record of infrastructure delivery with some programmes completed late; over budget; failing to secure the benefits expected; or cancelled after a significant investment. With the increasing challenge and complexity of the government's pipeline of major projects, the capacity to deliver is being stretched. The estimation of cost and schedule can be improved and major projects and programmes are tending to avoid innovation risk. These attitudes to uncertainty and risk are deeply engrained and cultural, with inconsistencies across Departments and ALBs. Together, they create barriers to the greater uptake of Modern Methods of Construction and driving productivity. This proposal offers a strategic, scalable and sector wide approach with Government, Client Groups, Suppliers and Academia working in partnership. To overcome these challenges, the 'Living lab' will work in collaboration with i3P and the CIH to tackle the systemic issues that still obstruct the use, integration and adoption of innovations that could drive productivity and wider social benefits through major construction schemes. It will be a catalyst for cultural change, shifting focus within infrastructure delivery decision-making from the costs of construction to an understanding of its whole life value. Statement from Professor Lord Robert Mair, Cambridge University, Chair of the DFT Science Advisory Council and Member, Transport Research & Innovation Board: "This demonstrator is a transformative collaboration. It uses data, technology and Modern Methods of Construction within live transport infrastructure projects to showcase the value of data visualisation through real-time data control rooms and demonstrates where we can drive even greater productivity and efficiency through innovation transfer. By implementing advanced construction and engineering techniques on live projects, we will deliver significantly better outcomes for society and provide the evidence needed to scale how we drive productivity across the transport infrastructure sector."

This project aligns with Theme 5 - 'Operations', with a particular focus on Traffic Management. Its purpose is to provide Highways England’s operators with a virtual advisory assistant, identifying issues across the Strategic Road Network in real-time and flagging them for further analysis by Regional Control Centre Operators. This will help to alleviate congestion before it spreads; alert unsafe scenarios such as pedestrians on the highways; and support collection of new datasets to improve future planning. Underpinning this will be a scalable, deployable service platform to demonstrate the use of state-of-the-art video analytics on the existing CCTV estate of the English strategic road network (SRN). By providing software tools to Highways England (HE) Regional Control Centres (RCCs), we will improve both the real-time situational awareness of operators of traffic incidents and conditions, and enable new reporting tools to improve the understanding of traffic flows on the SRN. Costain and Vivacity Labs will collaborate on this project, combining Vivacity's cutting edge Artificial Intelligence video analytics (VA) technologies with Costain's expertise on engineering technology solutions suitable for the demanding nature of the Strategic Road Network. The project will create an advisory software system to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the existing RCC people and processes, focusing on HE Operations Centres and staff as the key users of the insight provided by video analytics.

This project aims to make the link between Digital Roads and Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAV) a reality. Working with the vehicle supply chain, we will carry out a pilot to demonstrate the effectiveness of an Open Mobility Services Platform (OMSP) to make real time information seamlessly available to CAV. The corresponding in-vehicle systems will use this information to improve safety, congestion and experience for the road user. The OMSP will provide a level of reliability to enable CAVs to adapt to changes in operational conditions. It will disseminate data such as variable speed limit information in real time from Highways England systems in a format suitable to vehicles. The vehicles will then be able to: (1) Reliably provide advance advice to the drivers / occupants of the dynamic speed limit through Connected Road Sign Information (Connected RSI), (2) Independently decide how to use this information to dynamically adapt vehicle speeds using advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), paving the way for Connected Assisted Driving (CAD). Delivery of the pilot will be in 2 stages: Stage 1: Collaboration with Volvo to demonstrate the effectiveness of Connected RSI directly in the vehicle. This will ensure that the data from the Highways England NTIS system is formatted and suitably enriched for the consumption of a commercially available standard production car on a live motorway. Stage 2: Collaboration with AVL to extend on Stage 1 with the demonstration of the benefits of having reliable and real time dynamic speed limit information. This is achieved by dynamically and safely adapting the vehicle’s adaptive cruise control in line with the live speed limit and operational conditions. Key activities of the pilot to establish a proven OMSP will include: - Definition of requirements and technical specifications to develop and evaluate the success of the system and pilot - Development and integration of information transmission and on-board (in-vehicle) units alongside development of a product safety file (for simulated, off and on road tests) - Off road testing in a controlled environment to validate the safety file - Formal on-road testing on the Strategic Road Network using live Highways England data - Knowledge transfer to support Highways England as an intelligent client

Awaiting Public Project Summary

"Costain and BrydenWood's longstanding and innovative partnership is leading disruption of the traditional design/engineering services marketplace through the development of an integrated suite of tools to automatically design the infrastructure of the future. Our vision is for a **'data-centric infrastructure design process'** that will reduce the time and cost of railway design in a safe and transparent way. We will support Network Rail's Whole Systems Modelling team in the development and demonstration of a new Rail: Automated Infrastructure Design (R:AID) toolkit. The project aligns with the objectives of the Systems Operator, which are: * planning future strategic infrastructure investment * allocating capacity on the national rail network The current mechanism for planning investment and allocating capacity is isolated from the real-world environment. The processes for designing rail systems isolated from the planning model, its capacity requirements and options. We will demonstrate how: * We have built on existing generative design technologies * Can develop a solution relevant to rail * Deliver a demonstrator within 6 months Our project benefits from similar work for Highways England and seeks to remove the need for designing from first principles each time. We will take predetermined engineering standards, methods and procedures and adapt them to create a rules-driven multi-disciplinary process for rapidly designing and engineering a railway. This process, using a generative design approach based on formulae, logic and the input from rail engineering specialists, will seek to create a design that complies to the rules and regulations of the railway and the ORR, but dramatically reducing the time it takes to design, with accurate design leading to improved certainty of constructing and operating a railway. The result is a fully integrated digital design model that provides significant production efficiencies across the asset lifecycle and fully supports a projects business case and objectives. Digital design solutions will revolutionise productivity, lower exposure to harm, achieve predictable delivery on time, to lower cost, providing the desired quality with fewer defects."

"Current methods that predict pollutant emissions by estimating the number of cars on roads are highly inaccurate. This is because the real-world emissions per vehicle cannot be trusted, as the recent VW scandal has demonstrated. Nearly 40 million people in the UK are living in areas where illegal levels of air pollution from diesel vehicles risk damaging their health (ClientEarth 2017). According to the Royal College of Physicians (RCP), there are 40,000 deaths every year due to NO2, which has been linked to cancer, asthma, stroke, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and dementia; resulting in high cost to people who suffer from these illnesses and costing the economy £20 billion yearly (RCP 2017). The population is worried about the issue as, in 2017, 4000 people has used air-pollution monitoring kits in the UK (Friends-of-Earth). Despite the health threats accruable from emissions, no tool exists that visualises NO2 & CO2 emissions in real-time. Existing travel navigation assistants (e.g. Google Maps, Apple iOS Maps, Waze, automakers navigation systems, Tomtom, AA route-planner, etc.) do not provide information about NO2 & CO2 levels. This project will develop a system for Real-Time Emissions Visualisation (REVIS) for eco-friendly travel behaviour. REVIS will use IoT-sensors to obtain the actual amount of NO2 & CO2 emissions on roads and highways and visualise them in real-time. The REVIS system will consists of: (1) REVIS Travel Planner (RTP). This app will visualise in real-time NO2 & CO2 emissions on roads providing drivers, commuters, cyclists and pedestrians with accurate emissions levels along their planned journey. (2) Emission Visualisation as-a-Service (EVaaS) is a platform that provides emissions data to navigation and travel planner providers (e.g. Google Maps, Apple iOS Map; Waze, Tomtom, AA route-planner, etc.) so that they can include it on their solutions. (3) REVIS Cities Emissions Map and Monitor (RCEMM) will support local and highway authorities to monitor in real-time actual NO2 & CO2 levels. REVIS aims to provide a step-change in decision-making and behavioural change for emissions reduction. REVIS will enable local authorities to devise and test emission reduction policies tailored to their communities."

"The project, by targeting the productivity gap caused by construction equipment fleet - which represents major cost elements in most construction projects- is entirely aligned with the ISCF, in particular with the main theme of improving performance through digitally enabled solutions. The proposed solution is scalable and adaptable across the industry (building, rail, transport, highways, and utilities). The aim of the project is to explore the feasibility of improving productivity on site by 15% or more by increasing plant and equipment utilisation throughout the construction phase. This will be done by monitoring equipment output via on board IoT sensors; identifying patterns in equipment usage data to enable optimal planning; linking equipment output to the 4D BIM model; and visualising the data through and intuitive dashboard that will provide critical analytical information to contractors and the supply chain out on site. Effective equipment fleet-management provides opportunities for productivity gains for client, contractors, subcontractors, plant hire companies and the public (pollution/noise). Research by the consortium partners with HS2 at London Bridge and Crossrail show: utilisation rates are as low as 30%; 5x equipment duplication; crossover of equipment requirements between work packages, and site congestion resulting in H&S risks. Despite this significant impact on productivity, environment and safety, equipment fleets are still a major blind spot within construction because of the lack of data and adequate digital ecosystems. Earlier work by the consortium in HS2 confirmed demand by the construction supply chain for systems for equipment fleet-management (i.e. estimation/selection, deployment, coordination, and visualisation) pending key limitations being resolved. The project seeks to establish our position as one of the first and leading tech platforms combining IoT, BIM and data analytics."

In 2016, there were more than 233,000 cancelled rail journeys in the UK out of a total of 7.2 million planned journeys (Office of Road and Rail - ORR, 2016). The majority of these disruptions were caused by asset failures and unscheduled maintenance on the rail network. As a result, over £28 million was claimed by passengers from operators for service disruptions. Data available from rail network assets and users are sources of insight to address challenges experienced by passengers and station operators; unfortunately, this data has not been leveraged for this purposes (Network Rail 2016). This project will develop an IoT-enabled Platform for Rail Assets Monitoring and Predictive Maintenance (i-RAMP). The i-RAMP system is composed of two outputs: (i) Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based Simulation IoT Platform (ASIP), which will provide an interactive and holistic simulation platform to virtually evaluate the entire railway station, alert of potential failures and generate optimal maintenance regimes. (ii) Augmented Reality (AR) Toolkit, which will use mobile AR devices and Head Mounted Displays will support rail station maintenance. The i-RAMP system will employ techniques in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and Augmented Reality (AR) to enable predictive and preventive maintenance. The project's outputs will significantly reduce time to fix failures and it will provide better value to the end users. In addition, the i-RAMP system will enable a deeper understanding of customers' behaviours and to predict how services can be dynamically scaled to meet the demand of the passengers. _**Keywords**_: Predictive Augmented Reality for Rail Maintenance, IoT-based Intelligent Rail Stations, Enhancing Customer Experience in Rail Stations.

Driven by the need to reduce traffic congestion and accidents on our roads, the development and deployment of CAVs (connected and autonomous vehicles) will provide significant societal benefits, as well as business opportunities for the the automotive, comunications, infrastructure and transport sectors in the UK. Demonstrating CAVs on road, in real-world driving situations, not only helps to establish confidence in the technology, but also provides invaluable learning that can be incorporated to achieve the ultimate aim of making them, and the additional services that they could provide, a commercially viable and desirable means of road-transport. A consortium comprising of Amey, AVL, Costain, Coventry University, HORIBA MIRA, TfWM (Transport for West Midlands), WIG (Wireless Infrastructure Group) and the University of Warwick will therefore deliver a full suite of urban environments, in Coventry and Birmingham, to test CAVs and their related technologies and services, in order to accelerate their deployment in the real-world, benefitting the region and UK companies. Furthermore the testing will be supported by extensive public engagement and a database of participants who will help support the more human elements of technology and service evaluation. To attract continued R&D investment into the region and the UK, the test infrastructure will be operational after the project conclusion and will be fully self-sustaining.

The rail industry is growing fast but passenger experience within stations is often poor, particularly for the disadvantaged. But, without engaging passengers to innovate and develop solutions, the track record of success are low. The project, led by Milne Research with Costain, IBM and Institute for Manufacturing, aims to solve this problem by developing a digital & physical industry-wide innovation infrastructure for passenger engagement and innovation – Passenger Engagement and Innovation Infrastructure (PEII). Firstly, passengers need a physical interface so we will build Innovation Hubs at London Bridge and Euston stations enabling passengers to input their ideas and problems or trial and test real innovations in-the-making such as signage systems or seat designs. Often more imporant is process innovation such as making it better and easier to find your train, book or change a ticket - even letting someone know the toilets are not working! Secondly, for industry to be able to engage with passengers at the scale necessary, unlocking the power of IT is essential. Therefore, the innovation hubs will be kitted out with interactive touchscreens, VR booths and headsets etc. The entire digital innovation infrastructure will be accessible through the web, social media and integrated into a range of travel apps. In this digital world, passengers can continue to be engaged – also rewarded and recognised for their contributions. This is an industry first and we look forward to working with all passengers to help make UK rail the best in the world.

The collaboration between Iknaia, SenSat and Costain will give infrastructure projects a highly accurate, real-time digital copy of the physical environment with real-time asset tracking and recognition. This innovation will help public infrastructure projects to be delivered efficiently, cheaper and with less environmental impact. It will do this by allowing infrastructure projects to track their assets in the physical environment, reducing total spend on assets and improving the efficiency in which they work. Mobile computing and remote sensing have been identified by the Royal Academy of Engineering as two of the upcoming IT waves that will positively disrupt the business models of all industries. However, the infrastructure sector is widely expected to benefit the least due its lack of preparation in integrating mobile sensing and IT into its business workflows. This partnership between SME’s (Iknaia and SenSat) and FTSE 250 construction firm Costain will help to deliver this technological innovation to working infrastructure projects. Working as a feasibility study for further innovations in the same space; the project will deliver on three key innovations; 3D digital modelling, real-time asset tracking and workforce/project engagement.

Carbon dioxide is a major greenhouse gas and methods of capturing these emissions from power stations and industry are being developed. Studies have shown that without capturing our carbon emissions it will be very much more expensive to meet our decarbonisation commitments. However the changing mix of power plant and growing role of renewable technologies is making conventional carbon capture processes appear less attractive while industrial application is restricted by process complexity and high costs. The future generation mix will comprise renewable and nuclear generation supported by fossil fuelled power stations working when power from nuclear and intermittent sources cannot meet demand. PMW Technology has brought together concepts from other sectors to create a disruptive carbon capture technology that is about half the cost of the alternatives when applied to this future generation mix. Working with academics from Chester and Sheffield Universities and industrial partners, PMW Technology will validate the process and map its characteristics to target future development on the most effective design to remove carbon cheaply.

Net-Form uses data to turn a car park into a large MW-scale battery to provide power on demand to the electricity grid. It is an innovative, secure, data management platform that collects, aggregates and dynamically-optimises large populations of grid-connected electric vehicle batteries at a single location. Net- Form provides a managed service to the network and income to owners, who control access to their vehicles via a secure mobile application. Net-Form is unique in that integrates and analyses diverse sets of data and time-sensitive information to optimise the energy system in a non-invasive way.

Customer experience is enhanced it two ways, either improving services or resolving problems well. Either case cannot be achieved without engaging customers in innovation. However, for each customer-facing organisation (CFO) the cost and risks of building the necessary IT innovation infrastructure, individually, are considerable barriers. Worse still, such fragmentation is confusing for customers. The project will address these challenges by developing a single UK-wide innovation infrastructure seamlessly connecting customers to any CFO and their supply chain. The project will pilot the infrastructure on a range of CFO projects such as addressing the needs of the visually impaired passenger, better “wayfinding” at stations/platforms, reduction of disruption due to suicide attempts, innovative group ticketing e.g. families, school outings. They also want to develop customer experience enablers and digital assets including social media analysis, journey mapping, digital customer panels, extracting more insights from passenger surveys all of which will allow the industry to achieve a step- change in its ability to improve customer experience through innovation.

This project will develop and apply innovative data protection and information security techniques essential fora novel supply chain analytics tool. The tool was developed in the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) sector,and is to be applied to the construction industry. The aim is to create a digitally-enabled environment withinwhich construction organisations can build trust and create strategic partnerships necessary to achievesignificant cost reductions in the construction industry supply chain. Sharing data in a trusted environment isessential to driving change in the industry.The data security issues include potential security breaches due toweaknesses in application security architecture, implementation and configuration. Breaches also occur as aresult of poor access controls to sensitive data and the flow of that data between parties: data is either sharedmore widely than is necessary, or not shared at all. This project will take an approach that will allow access todata to be controlled not only by membership and role, but also according to content, context, time, place andneed - all within a clear governance structure.

This study will investigate the feasibility of using an innovative supply chain analytics capability to analyse a selected portion of a construction supply chain to identify levels and causes of unnecessary costs and delays. The solution will be applied to construction material, equipment and labour supply chains to provide visibility of material flows, demand and supply of resources and utilisations over time. The analysis will drill down to find root cause of inefficiencies and waste and identify opportunities for better integration and process improvement. The team will then assess the feasibility and benefits of applying supply chain best practice techniques that have been developed and proven in other industries. Building scenario models to investigate and demonstrate the impact of integrated supply chain practices built on principles of material flow and the levelling of demand on supplying resources. The findings from the project will be published and diseminated through supply chain and construction indusrty forums and a 'Discovery day' hosted by the University of Warwick.

The aim of this project is to develop an innovative easy to install, flexible, low cost building monitoring and management system infrastructure and interface. The system will harness the benefits of the power line carrier (PLC) technology currently used by TerOpta in its lighting control system in avoiding the need for additional wiring whilst not being subject to the constraints and drawbacks of wireless technologies. This in turn will make the product well suited to both new build and refurbishment applications. It will be well suited to smaller and simpler commercial buildings which would not traditionally have BMS installed. The product will comprise a basic energy metering and monitoring layer which is then expandable through the addition of supplementary modules offering the ability to incorporate control and management functions of varying levels of sophistication depending on the building context and targets. Particular emphasis is to be placed on innovation in simplification i.e. creation of a BMS system that is as low cost, robust and as simple to install and commission as possible.

Projects in the construction (AEC) sector generally involve collaboration between various participating companies over the (building construction) lifecycle using different systems and storage solutions. As part of this, the compatibility, control and access of data objects created is critical to the success of a project. Currently, coordination between participants is often a labour intensive manual process and can require a monopoly of software systems to be enforced. The C4C project will demonstrate how a multi-vendor Cloud computing system can be used throughout the lifecycle, thereby preventing single vendor lock-in and enabling a variety of Cloud environments, accessible at different costs, to be used. Data sharing through C4C will be managed and provenance-tracked to automate coordination and staged data verification, which will be based on the BIM process model. This approach will also offer a pragmatic, scalable delivery mechanism for the UK BIM agenda to be realised.

The overall vision is to develop a novel Autonomous Model Development Tool (AMDT) that will remove the failings of existing technology to fully represent the complex causal relationships within and between processes along complex and volatile production chains. This will involve the development of techniques that structure the causal relationships as autonomous control networks using the basic application principles of gene transcription regulatory control networks and the adaptive properties of biological immune systems. In achieving its aim the project will go beyond existing AI-based ‘black box' systems prone to correlation-degeneration through not using real causal-based process relationships. Benefits are step-changes in the responsiveness and effectiveness of process control, and greatly improved cost, quality, delivery and environmental sustainable process competencies. Academic partner’s EPSRC-funded autonomous research will be used within the AMDT.

Awaiting Public Summary

The Startlink lightweight building system is being developed by a consortium of companies with additional funding from the Technology Strategy Board - UK. Its aim is to revolutionise house-building. It is intended that both Passivhaus and Sustainability Code 6 criteria for overall thermal resistance and air-tightness would be met by the external envelope of the prototype Startlink house. The prototype house will be built in Bourne, Lincolnshire. The expected opening date is Autumn 2012.