{"id":769,"date":"2020-02-03T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-03T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.innovationnewsnetwork.com\/transport-infrastructure-resilience\/769\/"},"modified":"2020-04-02T11:17:36","modified_gmt":"2020-04-02T10:17:36","slug":"transport-infrastructure-resilience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.innovationnewsnetwork.com\/transport-infrastructure-resilience\/769\/","title":{"rendered":"Transport infrastructure resilience and statistical modelling"},"content":{"rendered":"

Meet the Southern Austrian consulting company specialising in statistical modelling techniques to shore up the resilience of transport infrastructure.<\/h2>\n

Did you know PEC – Petschacher Consulting are a partner of ours? Discover their partner page<\/a> and make sure you check out their captivating eBook<\/a> too!<\/h3>\n

Modern economies are based on complex networks. As these become more interconnected and more interdependent, they can also become more vulnerable to single points of failure. Energy, information, transport and water networks and infrastructure have been identified as requiring special protection. Much recent attention has been directed at the resilience of energy and information networks; however, this does not diminish the importance of the transport network.<\/p>\n

Industrial societies require the easy movement of goods and services: disruption of this movement, even briefly, has severe economic implications. This article will look at methods to avoid and minimise this disruption. We will ask what kind of events can affect the transport network, how we can anticipate them and how the network can be made more resilient.<\/p>\n

The transport network can be affected by a wide range of events, ranging from the catastrophic to the mundane. For the purposes of this article we will use a broad definition of \u2018event\u2019. We include dramatic events such as hacking, terrorism and natural disasters; but also events such as strikes, heatwaves, as well as the effects of long term infrastructure underinvestment and changes in demographics. We also treat maintenance operations, both emergency and planned, as events. The severity of an event depends on the criticality of the infrastructure it affects; whether it is a local event or affects a wider area, and whether there is permanent structural damage. While it may not be in our power to prevent these events, a resilient network will be able to cope and quickly recover.<\/p>\n

PEC is a consulting company, located in Southern Austria<\/a>, which specialises in the application of statistical modelling techniques to civil engineering. Typically, this means developing a rigorous physical model and then applying appropriate statistical models to play out various scenarios. Initially we applied these techniques to single components and structures, such as bridges, however we are developing models of the wider traffic network. In this article, we will outline our ideas both at the level of individual structures and the overall traffic network. We describe how our integrated approach to instrumentation systems and traffic network modelling techniques contributes to the resilience of transport infrastructure.<\/p>\n

Resilience of structures<\/h3>\n

Bridges and tunnels are chokepoints. Damage, intentional or otherwise, will have consequences for the wider network. These structures therefore require special attention both in the detection and avoidance of events, and in dealing with their effects. PEC has focused on the bridges. Relevant events include the deterioration of the bridge structure, vehicle collisions and weather-related events such as high winds, flooding and landslides.<\/p>\n

We have developed two classes of remote instrumentation systems for monitoring the resilience of bridges. Bridge Weigh in Motion (BWIM) systems monitor the speed, type and loading of heavy goods traffic over the bridge. Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems monitor structural deformation, weather conditions and the condition of the surrounding soil. The data captured by these systems is passed back to a central server for analysis and archiving.<\/p>\n

PEC offers software for traffic analytics based on this data; more recently we have also been active in the development of the \u2018digital twin\u2019 concept. The digital twin combines three elements:<\/p>\n