Infrastructure Transitions Research Consortium (ITRC) David Alderson & Stuart Barr

1. Infrastructure Transitions Research Consortium (ITRC) David Alderson & Stuart Barr • What is the aim of ITRC? • To develop and demonstrate a new generation of simulation models and tools to inform the analysis, planning and design of national infrastructure. • What are the challenges faced by ITRC? • Analysing the long term state of NI systems. • Quantifying and understanding uncertainties e.g. in demand, economic conditions, costs, performance. • The complexity of multiple governance arrangements and projects. • The capacity of UK industry to compete in globalised markets for infrastructure services. How are GeoInformatics@Newcastle involved? GeoInformatics at Newcastle are involved in three work streams of the ITRC project; the enabling tools and database being developed at Newcastle as part of work stream 4 are used to facilitate research across other work streams, whilst helping to integrate modelling undertaken in work stream 1. The analysis of interdependencies between national infrastructure networks is conducted in work stream 2, and uses custom databases and code developed at Newcastle. Figure.1 – ITRC work stream organisation Work Stream 1: Balancing infrastructure capacity and demand under uncertainty Work stream 1 is developing a generic modeling framework for the analysis of capacity and demand, under uncertainty, of 5 key national infrastructure networks including energy, transport, water, waste water and solid waste. As part of this framework an open source, web-based data upload facility has be developed to allow economic and population projections to be saved to the ITRC database. The economic and population projections, developed by Cambridge Econometrics and Leeds University respectively, are used as inputs to each of the capacity and demand assessment modules (CDAMs) for each national infrastructure network. Furthermore, a data query tool has been developed to allow federated users to generate comma-separated files (.csv), graphs, charts and maps of the different variables contained within the economic and demographic projections. Work Stream 2: Understanding the future risks of infrastructure failure Work stream 2 is developing interdependent network models of the 5 key infrastructure sectors and modelling the impacts and risk of failure. A custom database schema has been developed to manage, store and represent infrastructure networks, and their interdependencies (Figure 3). Each network has an edges, edge_geometry, and nodes table to store the edges and nodes of a particular network. An interdependency edge table stores the physical edges that exist between two different networks. Figure.4 shows the interdependency edges between water pumping stations (blue) and electricity sub stations (yellow) resulting from using the network interdependency schema and visualised using Quantum GIS. Work Stream 4: Enabling Tools Work stream 4 is focused on the design, development, delivery and management of a national-scale infrastructure asset database along with the development of software tools that allow researchers and decision makers to interact with the outputs generated from the other work streams. The ITRC database has been developed using the open source relational database software PostgreSQL, coupled with the spatial extension PostGIS. The data is organised into multiple database instances, with each storing data relevant to a particular sector e.g. energy, transport, water, waste water and solid waste. The data has been collected from a wide range of public, academic and private data sources supplied by ITRC project partners. In addition, data generated as part of the CDAMs is also stored within the ITRC database for archiving and future analysis purposes. Furthermore, databases have been created to store climate-related hazard data, and also the population and economic projections used throughout work stream 1 (see Figure.2). Figure.5 illustrates an example of the National Grid Gas Transmission Network and the National Grid Electricity Transmission Network stored within the ITRC database. This data is visualised via the use of the open source tool Quantum GIS. Population (Leeds) Economics (Cambridge) Upload Figure.3 – Entity-relationship model of a generalised representation of the network Interdependency schema. Storage ITRC Economics ITRC Population Open source web framework Query Query Figure.4 – An example of an interdependency between water pumping stations and electricity sub stations. Figure.5 – National Grid Gas Transmission and National Grid Electricity Transmission networks stored within the ITRC database. Figure.2 – Open source web framework for population and economic projections For further information on the ITRC project please contact: Mr David Alderson (Researcher on Work stream 1, 2 and 4): david.alderson@ncl.ac.uk Dr Stuart Barr (Lead on Work stream 4, ITRC Project Co-Investigator): stuart.barr@ncl.ac.uk Mr Benjamin Kidd (ITRC Project Manager, Oxford University): benjamin.kidd@ouce.ox.ac.uk http://www.itrc.org.uk – ITRC website http://twitter.com/#!/ukitrc/– Twitter In collaboration with: