All surface and buried infrastructure have a limited safe life and it is vital to evaluate their condition and structural integrity during their service life to avoid potential catastrophic failure due to their deterioration. Accurate assessment of infrastructure's condition is of significant financial and strategic importance and allows better resources planning. The research presented in this proposal offers an innovative solution in the form of a unified framework to assess and evaluate the condition and structural integrity of both underground utility and surface transportation infrastructure, and its surrounding ground, by means of combining physical non-destructive testing and numerical modelling. The physical tests will be used to generate necessary data for the damage detection algorithm. The numerical simulation involves a hybrid back-calculation algorithm based on integration of finite element analysis and a novel evolutionary computing technique. The proposed numerical approach will be able to capture the non-linear and complex behaviour of both the ground and the buried utility and detect damage in infrastructure by characterising reduction in the constitutive properties of the finite element model of the system between two time-separated inferences. The proposed framework in this project will provide sufficient information on mechanical and structural condition of a system and will enable asset managers to make informed decisions with respect to what, where, when and how interventions are required with emphasis on structural stability and integrity of the infrastructure.

Extreme weather causes damage to our infrastructure services such as energy supply, information and communications technology (ICT), transport, water supply, and more. Many of our infrastructure services are interdependent, and a failure in one sector leads to failure in other sectors. For example, failure of an electric substation due to extreme heat or flooding could lead to power cuts, reduced ICT services, and transport disruption because our road (eg. traffic lights) and railway networks need electricity to operate. Finding these infrastructure weak points that have a disproportionate impact across several infrastructure networks is essential for infrastructure resilience. Moreover, as our infrastructure has an operational lifetime of several decades or more we must act now to be prepared for future extreme weather. However, current adaptation plans are often done separately by each infrastructure sector (e.g. rail, ICT) and therefore by design do not consider infrastructure interdependencies. This proposal presents an alternative approach to adaptation planning that breaks down industry silos and uses H++ ("worst-case") extreme climate change scenarios. High emissions and H++ scenarios predict the equivalent of Mediterranean heat for Birmingham and the West Midlands in the future. This proposal will consider the impact that extreme heat would have on infrastructure of the region as a whole. Particularly, it will look for weak points that could cause multiple failures across several infrastructure sectors. The project will use best-practice examples of heat-resilient infrastructure from Mediterranean cities to identify potential adaptation strategies that could be used in the Midlands. Best practice examples will be those that deliver long-term sustainability and multiple benefits, such as urban greening, which can provide climate regulation to build heat resilience, but also improve air quality, provide sustainable urban drainage, and positively influence health and well-being. The weakest infrastructure links and examples of best practice will be shared with infrastructure operators/owners to facilitate holistic, evidence-based adaptation planning. The adaptation approach can be used in other cities and for other extreme weather types. Guidance documents will be created so the method can be applied nationally and internationally in different situations and regions. The library of best practice examples of sustainable heat-resilient infrastructure and heat adaptation measures will be available online for global dissemination. This proposal specifically addresses the LWEC challenge by applying a system-of-systems approach to develop heat resilient infrastructure at a city and regional scales. Birmingham is an excellent demonstrator; HS2 and the new terminus station will arrive in the city by 2026. 51,000 new homes are required for the growing population. It also faces multiple challenges that will be exacerbated by extreme heat including increasing demand for electricity and utilities, an urban heat island effect, and transport networks which are currently operating at capacity. Now is the time for effective adaptation planning before long-term decisions and irreversible infrastructure development are undertaken. Crucially, as the West Midlands moves to devolved government there is the opportunity for leading regional research like this to shape governance plans. Dr Emma Ferranti undertakes challenge-led research in urban climatology and infrastructure meteorology. She holds a NERC Knowledge Exchange Fellowship with networks including infrastructure operators, local authorities, planners, and professionals passionate about urban-greening. This Fellowship will enable her to establish a new multidisciplinary research area in decision-centric adaptation planning that utilises research excellence from the Schools of Engineering, and Geography, Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Birmingham.

Healthy infrastructure is critical in ensuring the continued health of UK society and the economy. Unfortunately, monitoring and maintaining our buildings and transport network is expensive. Considering bridges, inspection is usually carried out visually by human experts. There are not the resources to carry out the inspections as often as desired, or to make any repairs as quickly as needed; in the UK a backlog of maintenance works, identified in 2019, will cost £6.7bn. When resources are stretched, mistakes can be made, sometimes with tragic consequences; in 2018, despite warnings about possible problems, the Morandi Bridge in Genova, Italy, collapsed at a cost of 43 lives. Collapse is not the only problem; extreme weather events driven by climate change can test the performance of infrastructure beyond its limits e.g. consider the cost and inconvenience caused by bridge closures forced by flooding. Bridges are only one concern. The offshore wind (OW) sector has driven down energy costs and increased power output, and now pioneers a global change to clean energy. The UK leads globally in OW energy, with ~8 GW of capacity, expected to exceed 25 GW by 2030, providing almost one third of the UK's annual electricity demand and helping meet the Climate Change Act's (2008) difficult 2050 target for an 80% cut in UK carbon output. The drive for turbines in deeper water demands new ways of asset management, decision making and controlling and limiting operation/maintenance lifetime costs. As turbines increase in numbers, size, and capacity, these issues become even more important. The issues highlighted above are common across all elements of our infrastructure network (this PG will also consider telecoms infrastructure; another key test bed) and can be mitigated by automating the health monitoring. Instead of expensive, error-prone, human inspections, diagnoses can be provided economically by permanently-installed sensors, collecting structural data continuously and interpreting it via computer algorithms. This aim has led to the research discipline of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM), a subject of academic activity for over three decades. Despite intensive effort, SHM has not transitioned to widespread use because of a number of barriers - technical and operational. The main technological barriers are: optimal implementation of hardware systems; confident detection in the face of confounding effects for in situ structures e.g. wind, traffic, for bridges; lack of damage-state data limiting the potential of machine learning for SHM. The operational barriers are: inertia - over-reliance on conservative design codes; trust - the SHM system must be as reliable as the structure itself; transparency - complex technology must deliver interpretable, secure decision support. The key to progress is to shift from thinking about individual structures to thinking about populations. Population-Based SHM (PBSHM) is a game-changing idea, emerging in the UK very recently, with the potential to overcome the technological barriers above and transform our ability to automatically infer the condition of a structure, or a network of structures, from sensor data; this depends on an ability to collect a broader range of data, enriched into knowledge. ROSEHIPS will extend and exploit PBSHM, developing machine learning, sensing and digital twin technology for automated inference of health for structures in operation now, and drive new standards for safer, greener structures in future. The Programme brings together the perfect team, mixing complementary skills in machine learning and advanced data analysis with expertise in new sensor systems and insight into complex infrastructure systems. ROSEHIPS will provide open-source software systems, illustrated by realistic demonstrators and pre-populated with real-world data. Owners/operators will be able to customise and protect/secure their own data, while exploiting the knowledge base given.

The Urban Living Birmingham (ULB) Consortium brings together the expertise of four universities; national and international academic institutions; and very many local, regional and national organisations. The core academic team, led by the University of Birmingham with Birmingham City University, Aston University and the University of Warwick, have world-leading track records in cities, engineering, services and social sciences; a portfolio of pioneering inter-disciplinary research; and a deep understanding of Birmingham and the West Midlands. On 20th November 2015 a meeting of 39 representatives from across Greater Birmingham's public, private and third sectors was held to discuss the Urban Living Partnership Pilot Call. Taking a city focus within the context of the region, this group noted that the appetite for innovation in the development and delivery of urban services was high in Birmingham, but the degree of success and ability to integrate these innovations into mainstream strategies and policies varied greatly. Therein lies the paradox and it became evident that there is a missed opportunity for Birmingham, and British cities more generally, to co-innovate by effectively drawing upon end-users. As the largest city in the UK outside London, with one of the most diverse and youthful populations anywhere in the UK, the City of Birmingham has the potential to set a new agenda for 21st century urban living. Like most great cities, Birmingham is experiencing disruptive change brought about in part by global economic forces combined with reductions in national and local public expenditure. Since the late 1960s, Birmingham has performed poorly on all economic indicators. In addition, in 2014 a review of the city's governance and the organisational capabilities of the city council noted that Birmingham had problems that were so significant that they were of national importance. This project identifies the diverse and interdependent challenges facing the City of Birmingham by the application of a rigorous diagnostic process based on the analysis of datasets informed by end-users and representatives from the public, private and third sectors. The focus is on the identification of opportunities for innovation in integrated and city-wide solutions that cut across traditional policy silos and that have the potential to transform the city into a prosperous, healthy and vibrant living place. The Urban Living Birmingham consortium aims to identify improvements to urban services by combining top-down urban governance with bottom-up lay and expert knowledge to provide an environment that emphasizes and encourages innovations that generate a step change in urban service provision. It will do this by bringing together, developing and applying end-user and open innovation processes (from business disciplines) and participatory and cooperative design principles (from urban design disciplines) to selected urban services and systems to co-create a resilient Birmingham that provides 'better outcomes for people'. Most transformational service innovations occur when service providers go beyond listening to consumers to co-innovating with consumers. This user-centric approach to innovation reflects a process of end-user innovation in which users can modify existing products and services, but also service providers can learn from this process. Urban Living Birmingham will contribute towards the transformation of Birmingham into a city that is a regional asset and a global beacon for urban service innovation; a city with an exceptionally rich quality of urban living, increased social cohesion, reduced deprivation, increased connectivity and productivity, and a healthy urban population.

Water for all is the aim of this consortium. The UK water sector faces grand challenges over the coming decades: increasing population, ageing infrastructure, and the need to better protect the natural environment all under conditions of uncertain climate change. The application of traditional technology-based solutions alone is not the way forward. We propose the use of 'tailored solutions' to address these challenges by combining measures to suit specific circumstances and constraints to achieve flexible and adaptive water systems. The project will undertake research in 8 technical themes, each of which individually pose disruptive questions, demonstrate the potential for, and lead transformation. However, they will not be viewed in isolation. When considered in combination, taking a systems view, they can be combined as 'silver baskets' of broader tailored solutions able to work synergistically for existing and new infrastructure in order to achieve transformative impact. Tailoring water solutions does not mean lower quality water services for different sectors in society; rather, it means fair, bespoke solutions appropriate to variations in the natural environment, population distribution, and legacy infrastructure. In this way the project will address the needs of water for all. Our consortium is built around a core based on the Pennine Water Group (PWG) which has been supported continuously by three EPSRC platform grants since 2001. The PWG's strength and international reputation is founded on a balance of fundamental and applied research via a multi-disciplinary approach focusing on urban water asset management. This consortium broadens the PWG to include new expertise to provide tailored water solutions for positive impact. At Sheffield, this will include new collaborations with experts in energy systems, robotics, automation, and management. Externally, the consortium includes internationally-leading experts from Exeter for household and community scale water efficiency, Imperial College for treatment and emerging contaminants, Manchester for social practices, Newcastle for climate change impacts, risk modelling and cities/infrastructure integration, and Reading for catchment processes. All members bring wide international collaborative networks that will link with the scientific and engineering research needed to deliver the silver baskets of tailored solutions. To achieve the envisioned transformation requires time and a step change in the way in which the UK water sector identifies, develops and applies innovation. Stakeholders need to move out of traditional silos and collaborate to creatively co-produce knowledge and action. Academics, scientists and engineers must work across disciplines and stages in the knowledge production process to deliver the complex socio-technical solutions needed to meet the challenges facing the UK water sector. Collaboration is especially relevant in a sector that is not accustomed to working together and does not have a shared vision of how to meet its grand challenges. A unique feature of this consortium is the development of the Hub that will revolutionise the way innovation is delivered to the UK water sector. The Hub aims to provide transformative leadership and accelerate and support innovation through partnerships for the co-production of knowledge across the water sector. Underpinned by world class science and engineering research the Hub will facilitate the development and communication of a shared visionary roadmap for the UK water sector, stimulate and demonstrate new tailored approaches to address the grand challenges, create a process for selecting potentially transformative tailored socio-technical solutions in line with the roadmap and enable the accelerated generation of collaborative, responsible innovation across the UK water sector.