ONEPlanet DTP - Managing urban flood resilience with automated flood event reporting on the strategic road network (SRN) through innovative digital technologies (OP2136)

The Strategic Road Network provides 4300 miles of motorway and major A-roads with four million people driving on the network every day. Unprecedented downpours across the country in recent years is increasing flooding events on the Strategic Road Network. Flooding of a small part of the network can result in many thousands of people being stranded and in multi-million damages, as observed on the Strategic Road Network in recent years. The wider impact of flooding on urban fabrics is also enourmous. The UK government spends around £1.3 billion each year to address damages from flooding. Monitoring and reporting of flood events on the Strategic Road Network provides an expedient feedback for recovery and adaptation measures.
Flood resilience aims to minimise the damage during the flooding event, reduce the costs for flood recovery, and efficiently deploy recovery measures. Available studies have investigated how to define, measure, and assess the flood resilience from different perspectives. However, there is still a dearth of: (1) studies proposing operational frameworks, enabled by digital innovation, for minimising flood impact and achieving resilience targets through improved mornitoring and reporting; (2) limited evidence of wider testing of proposed solutions at ‘network’ level – testing is often performed in specific or siloed case studies – involving a ‘multi-agency’ approach for sharing information about flood reporting and monitoring; and (3) lack of integration of proposed solutions within legacy systems of government agencies (i.e. Highways England) and their infrastructure strategy’s key performance indicators.
The aim of this research is twofold: to develop an operational framework, enabled by digital technologies (e.g. IoT, Drones, Satellites, cloud computing) and data-analytics methods, for improving infrastructure resilience through enhanced monitoring and reporting of flood events on the SRN; and to develop and test a novel tool for prediction of flooding events on the SRN that uses both existing infrastructure data and data generated from the deployment of the operational framework. The Industrial partner, Costain, will be actively involved to provide industrial resources and expertise, as well as infrastructure data.