"Measuring movement and deformation in civil infrastructure assets including urban buildings, bridges, tunnels, structures and earthworks is a common and vitally important requirement both during any construction works to ensure project productivity, but also critically over the asset lifetime to be able to monitor and assess potential long- term degradation and reduce the risk of failure through predictive and preventative decision making. Typical existing monitoring solutions rely either on mains powered optical sensors and/or the use of other wired and mains powered sensors and instrumentation or even manual methods involving site visits, all of which impose significant limitations in terms of ease and speed of deployment, initial and whole life cost, reliability, precision and repeatability, and frequency of intervention or site visits and safety related issues. The LORADDS project seeks to develop an innovative, digital, autonomous, totally wireless sensor solution for structural and ground monitoring applications which importantly draws upon Senceive's existing wireless sensor platform allied with proven expertise in areas ranging from wireless communications, sensors, and 100's of deployments of reliable electronic systems in tough and challenging Civil, Rail and Construction environments. The project will be led by Senceive Ltd, a high-growth London based SME and will draw on expertise from collaborator AECOM, as well as other multi levelled relationships with organisations including Network Rail and London Underground. The project outputs are targeted at addressing a clear and growing requirement in UK and International markets for smart and resilient infrastructure monitoring solutions which can be quickly and easily deployed to measure displacement and deformation in bridges, tunnels, earthworks and other fixed assets for periods ranging from a few days to potentially decades."

The Sensor and Satellite Asset Alert and Management System (SSAAMS) project will take a systemic approach to improving infrastructure management of energy, transport and urban earthwork systems. The core innovation of the proposed system is the development of business decision support tools based on the analysis of low cost sensor data, combined with open access satellite data, and other sources of data to monitor and predict areas of high risk where disruption to urban living might occur. A monitoring and alerting system will identify potential and actual ‘failure’ events so asset managers (e.g. Amey, Network Rail and Local Authorities such as Sheffield City Council and Buckinghamshire County Council) can take proactive action to mitigate a potential event, or to react quickly and precisely to detected failures therefore making the infrastructure assets more resilient and minimise costly future interventions as well as improving the daily lives of citizens. The benefits of SSAAMS include: 1) improved intelligence, 2) greater asset resilience and longer lifetime expectancy, 3) reduced cost of asset management and event failure incidents, and 4) reduced impacts on citizens from transport, energy and urban system disruptions.

Remote Condition Monitoring (RCM) solutions enable owners of rail, utility and industrial infrastructure to monitor the state of their assets in an efficient and robust manner, both to plan for future investment and most importantly to be informed when problems with often ageing and remote assets are likely to occur. Currently at least 95% of the monitoring solutions deployed are hard wired and this makes them expensive and often very challenging to deploy in remote or difficult to access locations. However the adoption of wireless solutions and the visibility of the benefits case for using wireless monitoring is growing, and in time expected to account for a significant proportion of a global and growing market for multi-application monitoring solutions that is worth billions pounds per annum. Wireless is also expected to unlock new opportunities for improved asset knowledge and maintenance, provided the monitoring solutions can be shown to perform in a robust and reliable manner and thus in line with expectations of markets that are most often highly safety and reliability conscious. Senceive Ltd a wireless monitoring solutions provider, has had success in early and paid deployment trials. These indicated clearly the positive benefits of using wireless and identified a range of potential use cases for the technology platform. However they have also highlighted a series of limitations that need to be addressed before wide scale adoption will be feasible. The project for which SMART support is sought will deliver a prototype, near real-time, wireless monitoring platform that would be a genuine step change in the provision of credible, robust, reliable as well as easy to deploy and low cost RCM solutions that primarily addresses the needs of end-users across global geo-technical and structural asset monitoring applications in the first instance and which will in time also address needs in the Buildings and Utilities sectors.

Awaiting Public Summary