Emergency Resource Location-Allocation and Deployment (eROAD) Tool

Completed

Not Energy Related
Other Power and Storage Technologies(Electricity transmission and distribution)

Basic and strategic applied research

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY (Electrical and Electronic Engineering)
ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY (General Engineering and Mineral & Mining Engineering)

Not Cross-cutting
Sociological economical and environmental impact of energy (Environmental dimensions)

Dr S Dunn
Sch of Engineering
Newcastle University

Standard

EPSRC

01 May 2017

01 August 2019

27 months

£97,071

Civil eng. & built environment

North East

NC : Engineering

Dr S Dunn, Sch of Engineering, Newcastle University

Project Contact, University of Wollongong, Australia
Project Contact, National Grid plc
Project Contact, ENA - Energy Networks Association
Project Contact, Highways Agency
Project Contact, Department for Transport
Project Contact, Technical University of Delft, The Netherlands

Infrastructure systems, such as water, electrical and transport networks, form the backbone of a countries social, economic and environmental wellbeing and underpin the stable functioning of our modern communities.These systems are currently being subjected to a multitude of challenges - from a changing climate, to increasing population demands and economic austerity. The individual components of infrastructure systems (e.g. roads, bridges, reservoirs) are constructed to have long asset lives and existing components were not designed to cope with these ever increasing external pressures. As a consequence, the ability of our infrastructure systems to provide a basic quality and quantity of service after a severe weather event is being compromised. In the case of the winter 2013/14 storms, almost 1million households were cut off from electricity supplies and many we not reconnected for several days. We therefore require solutions to increase the resilience of our infrastructure systems and to minimise the disruption to our communities after a severe weather event.In many cases, current solutions to increase the resilience of infrastructure systems are based on an ad hoc procedure. This is mainly due to the current high levels of uncertainty regarding long-term climate projections, meaning that they cannot be reliably used as a basis for changing the design of future assets (e.g. through alteration of design codes), or to inform decisions to permanently alter current assets (e.g. through the construction of permanent flooding defences). Within this current "period of flux" we cannot simply do nothing, nor can we base decisions upon such uncertain models, we therefore require alternate more "adaptive" solutions to increase the resilience of our infrastructure. This research will develop a new generation of analysis and decision making tools required by engineers to identify how to locate, and when to deploy, resources to protect critical infrastructure during extreme weather events. Using this solution, a "baseline level" of service to our communities can be ensured, through either the protection of individual assets or through the provision of a temporary service, without the need of long-term climate scenarios to inform decisions

16/01/18