Infrastructure is fundamental to our economy and society, e.g. being one of the 10 pillars of the recently launched UK Industrial Strategy. Long linear (geotechnical) assets (LLAs) are a major component of this infrastructure and fundamental to the delivery of critical services over long distances (e.g. road & railway slopes, pipeline bedding, flood protection structures). Central government infrastructure investment will rise by almost 60% to £22 billion p.a. by 2022 (ONS). This will support both the development of new infrastructure, and the repair of existing infrastructure. At present, there are 10,200 km of flood defences in Great Britain; 80,000 km of highways; 15,800 km of railway). Failure of these assets is common-place (e.g. in 2015 there were 143 earthworks failures on Network Rail - >2 per week), the resulting cost of failure is high (e.g. for Network Rail, emergency repairs cost 10 times planned works, which cost 10 times maintenance), and vulnerability to these failures is significant (748,000 properties with at least a 1-in-100 annual chance of flooding; derailment from slope failure is the greatest infrastructure-related risk faced by our railways). However, the exact reasons for - and timing of - failure is, at present, poorly understood. This leads to unanticipated failures that cause severe disruption and damage to reputation. Current approaches to design and asset management perpetuate this situation as they are based on past experience, which cannot be extrapolated to future performance: the infrastructure is older, ever more intensively used and subject to increasingly extreme weather patterns. Together, these factors significantly increase the likelihood of failures in the future causing reduced performance and poorer service. Climate change has been identified as one of the factors driving this change. There is an exciting opportunity to bring together new advances in research and technology with design and asset management practices from different LLAs to reduce the risks posed to infrastructure systems by deterioration and future change. Current techniques can estimate future rates of deterioration that might lead to failure in transport infrastructure slopes, but are difficult to scale up, do not capture all drivers of deterioration relevant to all LLAs, are poor at dealing with uncertainty and heterogeneity, and lack rigorous validation against representative field data. Different asset owners have access to vast quantities of failure and condition data from their networks (recently enabled by technological advances in data capture and storage) but use different approaches to address failure based on historical data. ACHILLES proposes a research programme that brings these approaches together, coupled with statistical advances to enable rigorous use of network data, and economics to assess the value of design, monitoring and mitigation options. Our long-term vision is for the UK's infrastructure to deliver consistent, affordable and safe services, underpinned by intelligent design, management and maintenance. ACHILLES proposes a Programme to address this challenge by combining laboratory/field experimentation, numerical modelling and simulation, statistical data and cost benefit analysis, and activities to enable its outcomes to be adopted by LLA owners/operators: Deeper understanding of material and asset deterioration and how to model and predict New design tools to account for deterioration; and assessment tools to characterise Strategies to mitigate deterioration from material to asset scale Decision-making framework to prioritise spending on design, monitoring and/or interventions that accounts for heterogeneity and uncertainty, and informs appropriate business cases Better understanding of the importance of characterising heterogeneity and uncertainty for infrastructure decision making processes Knowledge and tools to incorporate data analytics into asset assessment and monitoring

Natural flood risk management (NFM) describes methods of modifying hillslope and catchment runoff through the modification of landscapes to restore natural hydrological behaviour which limits downstream flood risk. This proposal is for a focussed study of NFM benefits associated with wider ecosystem restoration work which is under way across the uplands of the UK. Headwaters comprise 60-80% of the length of most river systems and high slopes and high rainfall mean that they are important areas of hillslope runoff production. Across the UK there are communities which are prone to flash flooding from steep upland catchments. These headwater catchments are relatively small catchments and are areas where extensive upland restoration is occurring and so they are locations where positive impacts of NFM measures are likely to be observed. Vulnerable communities in headwaters are often small and dispersed with land values that rarely justify hard engineering flood defences through standard cost-benefit approaches. If relatively low cost upland restoration approaches can mitigate risk to communities such as this then it will be possible to provide some protection to communities where funding precludes hard engineering approaches. This project will work with project partners Moors for the Future and Greater Manchester, Merseyside and Cheshire Environment Agency who have existing funded NFM work in the southern Pennines to undertake a series of field experiments. These will assess the potential impact of various forms of gully blocking, restoration of Sphagnum cover on moorlands, and establishment of upland woodlands on hillslope runoff production and channel flow. It will also assess the longer term evolution of woodland and gully blocking approaches through the study of mature woodland and well established gully blocked systems. This is an important consideration since investment in NFM works requires confidence in the long term impact of the restoration on runoff and knowledge of any ongoing maintenance costs for the interventions. Installation of NFM schemes to mitigate flood risk requires careful planning and prediction of potential impacts. This project will develop conceptually sophisticated but computationally simple models which can run multiple scenarios in order to assess the catchment wide impacts on runoff of NFM measures implemented to a variety of designs and in a variety of spatial configurations. The model will be developed (with input from project partner CH2M and input from potential users such as EA) and validated using data from the Glossop Brook catchment in Derbyshire which has a history of major flash flooding impacting households in the town of Glossop. The modelling approach will then be used to assess possible NFM interventions in the upland catchments draining to 21 communities at risk on the eastern edge of Greater Manchester. In each of these catchments we will model the optimum configuration of upland restoration measures for NFM benefit. The project will also work with partners (Environment Agency, Natural Resources Wales, Scottish Environmental Protection Agency, International Union the Conservation for Nature) to identify existing headwater flow records across the UK which relate to areas of significant upland restoration. At these sites we will model expected impacts and interrogate the available flow data for evidence of these effects on runoff. The project will work with its range of project partners which span England, Wales and Scotland and which comprise regulators, land managers and industry to develop guidelines to optimise future implementation of NFM measures in headwater catchments across upland Britain.

The vision of RM4L is that, by 2022 we will have achieved a transformation in construction materials, using the biomimetic approach first adopted in M4L, to create materials that will adapt to their environment, develop immunity to harmful actions, self-diagnose the on-set of deterioration and self-heal when damaged. This innovative research into smart materials will engender a step-change in the value placed on infrastructure materials and provide a much higher level of confidence and reliability in the performance of our infrastructure systems. The ambitious programme of inter-related work is divided into four Research Themes (RTs); RT1: Self-healing of cracks at multiple scales, RT2: Self-healing of time-dependent and cyclic loading damage, RT3: Self-diagnosis and immunisation against physical damage, and RT4: Self-diagnosis and healing of chemical damage. These bring together the four complementary technology areas of self-diagnosis (SD); self-immunisation and self-healing (SH); modelling and tailoring; and scaling up to address a diverse range of applications such as cast in-situ, precast, repair systems, overlays and geotechnical systems. Each application will have a nominated 'champion' to ensure viable solutions are developed. There are multiple inter-relationships between the Themes. The nature of the proposed research will be highly varied and encompass, amongst other things, fundamental physico-chemical actions of healing systems, flaws in potentially viable SH systems; embryonic and high-risk ideas for SH and SD; and underpinning mathematical models and optimisation studies for combined self-diagnosing/self-healing/self-immunisation systems. Industry, including our industrial partners throughout the construction supply chain and those responsible for the provision, management and maintenance of the world's built environment infrastructure will be the main beneficiaries of this project. We will realise our vision by addressing applications that are directly informed by these industrial partners. By working with them across the supply chain and engaging with complementary initiatives such as UKCRIC, we will develop a suite of real life demonstration projects. We will create a network for Early Career Researchers (ECRs) in this field which will further enhance the diversity and reach of our existing UK Virtual Centre of Excellence for intelligent, self-healing construction materials. We will further exploit established relationships with the international community to maximise impact and thereby generate new initiatives in a wide range of related research areas, e.g. bioscience (bacteria); chemistry (SH agents); electrochemical science (prophylactics); computational mechanics (tailoring and modelling); material science and engineering (nano-structures, polymer composites); sensors and instrumentation and advanced manufacturing. Our intention is to exploit the momentum in outreach achieved during the M4L project and advocate our work and the wider benefits of EPRSC-funded research through events targeted at the general public and private industry. The academic impact of this research will be facilitated through open-access publications in high-impact journals and by engagement with the wider research community through interdisciplinary networks, conferences, seminars and workshops.