Public Funding for In Touch Limited

Our key technical challenges have been identified through extensive engagement with rail infrastructure owners. During the TrackWater project we conducted workshops and interviews with Network Rail staff at a wide range of levels including the Head of Asset Protection and Optimisation, Drainage Engineers, Senior Asset Engineers, Route Asset Managers (RAMS) and Delivery Units. These workshops, in combination with our own experiences of creating the TrackWater proof of concept system identified a series of technical challenges that must be addressed as part of any credible demonstration. These are: (i) Creating a self-reliant power system for TrackWater. During the development of the TrackWater system the difficulty of obtaining power trackside has become clear. In many parts of the network where we wish to deploy our data concentrators there is no readily available power supply and the system must operate “off-grid”. Moreover, connecting to trackside power makes product acceptance more challenging. We therefore wish to test and demonstrate a set of stand-alone solar powered sensors and gateways that can be deployed without the need to connect to the power infrastructure. While we have shown in lab-studies that these is feasible, this will be the first demonstration of our self-reliant sensor infrastructure and represents the first of our technical deliverables. (ii) Demonstrating full support for LoRa communications. Demonstrating support for a range of IoT communications technologies is critical to reassure customers that the TrackWater system will not become obsolete due to changes in radio technologies or standards. The current TrackWater proof of concept relies on UHF communications. However, there is increasing interest within the rail sector and beyond in the use of LoRa for IoT communications. While we have conducted early research into the use of LoRa we have not explored this in field deployments. Our second technical deliverable will be a set of LoRa based prototypes that can be demonstrated in the rail environment - helping to reassure potential customers that TrackWater can adapt to changes in the technology landscape. (iii) Determining appropriate integration points with existing decision support systems. The TrackWater system provides data designed to assist a diverse eco-system of potential data consumers involved in deciding when maintenance should be performed and evidencing drainage renewal schemes. This eco-system includes Route Asset Managers who determine when drainage assets need maintaining by the Delivery Units. An important challenge is how these data feeds should be integrated into existing systems. Our innovation is to supply TrackWater as a self-contained system that can serve as a decision support tool rather than a prescriptive tool – in other words TrackWater will be designed to enhance existing systems rather than replace them. Our discussions with Network Rail suggest that this is likely to lead to much more rapid adoption as it will circumvent the need to engage in lengthy IT projects aimed at data feed integration (pursuing this route would delay the adoption of our project by some years). Our third deliverable is thus a demonstration of the use of system as part of the decision making process. (iv) Evaluating TrackWater to provide proofs for potential customers. An important technical challenge is how to evaluate the accuracy of the sensors and the utility of the decision support system when deployed in the field. Lab-based measurements are simple to conduct but are not compelling for potential customers. We will adopt a “mixed methods” approach to evaluation – using a combination of inspections and multiple redundant sensors to obtain ground truth readings and ethnographic techniques for understanding user attitudes and cultural practices for decision support. We will not be able to evaluate the effectiveness of the system outputs in terms of delivering more effective cleansing regimes within a 9 month timescale – this will require long-term use - but we will be able to show the accuracy and utility of the data produced by the system. Our deliverable will be a report on our findings. (v) Obtaining Product Acceptance. A key challenge for any technical innovation in the rail industry lies in gaining the necessary approvals and product acceptance. In working with Network Rail we have gained experience of these challenges first-hand. During the proposed project we will collaborate closely with Network Rail to prepare a full submission to the product acceptance review board and this submission represents our final technical deliverable. Our demonstrator will show the end-to-end TrackWater solution in operation. We will target Wales Route, focussing on 2 flooding hotspots, Porthkerry Tunnel and Ewenny (Vale of Glamorgan). Porthkerry Tunnel has known siltation issues and is currently difficult to monitor due to its location. Ewenny is an area susceptible to sinkholes which causes failures in the earthworks leading to track faults and flooding. We will deploy 50 silt and flood probes across the 2 sites and use this data to model the drainage asset condition in order to manage the flood risk proactively and provide integrated decision support.

The rail network relies on an extensive system of trackside drains to remove surface water and minimise the risk of flooding and damage to the network. Failure to maintain the drainage infrastructure can have significant cost and safety implications for the parent asset; such as delay minutes, poor track geometry, line closures and the likelihood of earthwork failures. Our focus is on improving the performance of the rail infrastructure's drainage system - a critical, yet often overlooked element of the network infrastructure in order to help "design, build and operate railway infrastructure at reduced cost". Our approach is to leverage previous work on an innovative self-learning system for maintaining drainage networks in the highways sector and adapt this technology – including the IoT sensor network, data models and decision support system - for use in the rail sector. This represents a major advance in the state of the art as it will address key challenges identified by Network Rail and enable proactive maintenance of trackside drainage assets. Our consortium includes Network Rail as a challenge owner, InTouch Ltd as a technology supplier and primary route to market, and a strong science base consisting of the Transport Systems Catapult and Lancaster University. The resulting system will be tested on 14 miles of Network Rail test track.

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Increasing levels of urbanization and climate change dictate that managing surface water in cities is an area of major concern. At present the maintainers of the surface water drainage infrastructure have a limited understanding of the way in which this network operates and how it should best be maintained to protect citizens from the risks of flooding and environmental damage through pollution. Existing systems, pioneered by members of this consortium, have recently enabled new forms of intelligent maintenance regimes but their effectiveness is severely constrained by the limited data available. In this project we will create a system that delivers a step-change in the quality and quantity of data available from our urban water infrastructure and enables a transformation in our understanding of the network and how best it can be maintained. If successful we will deliver a world-class urban surface water management system that can be used to increase the effectiveness of city maintenance practices, support new data-driven applications and reduce overall costs in a time of increasing urbanization.

Traditionally transport maintenance activities are planned and implemented in silos based on the mode of transport (road, rail etc), the type of asset (e.g. motorways vs trunk roads) and the contractors involved. This silo-based approach has been compounded by the fixed maintenance schedules that have been employed on many transport assets. However, recent advances in mobile computing and new forms of maintenance contract means that for the first time there is the possibility to consider how maintenance can best be planned and conducted in a smart, integrated fashion that spans across transport modes and that can be effectively communicated to travellers – enabling the UK to maximise the use of its transport infrastructure in a holistic manner. In this study we will explore the feasibility of creating an in-field trial of such an approach using the M25 as a test site. The study will consider the benefits to both transport infrastructure owners and maintainers and the general travelling public with the overall aim of assessing whether it is possible to both reduce congestion and maintain the transport infrastructure more effectively and efficiently.

The Project is a feasibility study to determine how valid it may be to use environmental data combined with traffic volume and behaviour, in using this to reasonably predict potential 'hot spots' where water pollution may be likley to occur at problematic levels as a result of toxins from roads. Where toxins are forecast to cause a detriment to waterways impacting aquatic life and vegetation, this information may be used to inform highways maintenance operatoral decisions in terms of what maintenance activities to carry out and at what point in time, taking into account the type of toxins, upcoming rainfall, locations to sensitive waterways and so on. This study will determine the viabilty of this approach to enable smarter maintenance of UK Roads and Gullies.

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In this project we will explore in detail the feasibility of connecting significant portions of the UKs highways assets to the Internet of Things – thus creating virtual representations of a very large number of key physical assets. The data will be provided by Carillion – one of the project subcontractors. Carillion have access to significant data relating to highways assets. This data is collected and updated either manually through inspection of assets or automatically via telemetry. For example, Carillion collect data on the gullies that they empty. This data is collected using a mobile data application that enables cleaning crews to automatically provide real-time data on the status of the gullies they are emptying. As a result it is possible to build up an accurate picture of gullies that get blocked regularly and hence need frequent cleaning and those that are typically clear and running when inspected and hence do not need such frequent maintenance. It is also possible to enhance this type of data collection with remote monitoring of water flows through the gullies using simple telemetry. Such remote monitoring is commonplace on more expensive highways assets such as traffic lights and matrix signs. There is a wide range of highways asset data that can be generated automatically and potentially used to update an asset’s virtual representation. For example, during the winter months gritting wagons are typically fitted with GPS tracking devices that also monitor the amount of salt the gritter is placing on the road. Live feeds from such vehicles could be used to infer the state of the highway itself and provide potentially life-saving information to travellers. Within the context of the project we will use real data produced by Carillion. We will explore the usage of this data with real end-users in the form of various Council departments – especially those involved in highways maintenance, emergency planning (flooding) and travel information. Thus our study will be conducted in the context of a real council making use of real highways asset data collected both before and during the study by a real highways maintenance operative. We will also work with other stakeholders to explore how the real data feeds we have collected can be used in other business areas such as enhanced provision of travel information. To achieve this we will leverage links we have established through our work on the TSB funded OurTravel project that has looked at novel travel information data feeds. The project consortium have considerable experience of working in a multidisciplinary environment and bring together expertise in the highways sector, software development, business processes, ethnographic studies and technology. To address the five key questions we propose to use a mix of three main investigative techniques. We will begin with a series of stakeholder workshops (led by InTouch and Carillion) that will explore in detail the convergence scenario with the producers, holders and potential users of data from our highways assets. These workshops will follow the successful format of innovation workshops that InTouch have used as part of the Faith project and that the University has extensive experience of running for clients such as health trusts, broadcasters and management consultancy companies. The workshops will each produce reports that capture the key points discussed during the event. These reports will be circulated amongst participants and made available as part of our project output. The workshops will be followed up by a series of ethnographic visits (led by InTouch) in which trained ethnographers will study the work of the various stakeholders to understand organizational and people issues that may impact on the successful adoption of an Internet of Things based approach – focusing in particular on potential barriers to connecting highways assets to the Internet of Things. This ethnographic work will be complimented by research into the technical aspects of how to connect the data held about street assets to the Internet of Things (led by Lancaster University). Finally we will revisit our stakeholders with a series of focus groups or one-to-one meetings that enable us to sanity check our findings and solicit final feedback (led by InTouch). The collected report based on the workshops, ethnographic visits, technical investigation and focus groups will provide the project’s answers to each of the five questions.

'Faith is often described as being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. In this 2 year project InTouch Ltd, Carillion and Lancaster University are developing innovative trusted digital services that will enable citizens, local authorities and contractors to have the faith in each other and the systems they use to work in partnership to maintain the UK's transport infrastructure more efficiently. At present such maintainance is an opaque process with potential distrust between the stakeholders and the data they exchange. For example, members of the public can report road defects but can rarely monitor the progress of repairs and are often left wondering what repairs are being carried out and why. Local authorities feel the need to visit reported defects before logging them as faults and then to revisit the defects after they have been repaired to check on the work. This lack of trust and the desire to continually inspect work has major cost implications. The project includes a multidisciplinary team of social scientists, ICT specialists and end-users.

The OurTravel project aims to support informed personal travel through the provision of real-time, multi-modal, context-sensitive travel information. OurTravel will explore the use of social networking and the notion of travel communities within the context of personal travel enabling users to become the primary source of travel information. Moreover, alternative information sources such as travel information feeds and highways maintenance activities will also provide additional streams of context-sensitive travel information that can feed directly into affected communities and augment existing information provided by personal travellers. Therefore, OurTravel acts as an enabler not only for supporting collaboration between personal travellers but also workers in the field undertaking infrastructure management tasks. One key aspect to this collaboration is integration with an intelligent works order system that could enable travel information to be automatically generated and helping to make such information available to travellers within communities that it directly affects - enabling users to make more informed decisions about how and when to travel.