About
Adrian Hickford is a Senior Research Assistant within Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Southampton.
Research
Research groups
Research interests
- Methods to assess future changes to national and regional infrastructure systems
- Promoting use of active travel and sustainable transport and improvements to road safety
- Sustainable distribution and freight
Current research
Currently, Adrian is a researcher on the Future Transport Zone (FTZ) project, Theme 2, which focuses on Freight within the Solent Transport region. The macro-consolidation aspect of the study aims to provide an understanding of the use, benefits and future opportunities provided by Southampton’s Sustainable Distribution Centre (SDC), which was set up in the mid-2010s as part of the UK Government’s Sustainable Local Transport Fund grant, with the aim of providing local businesses and public sector bodies with opportunities to engage in sustainable logistics, including consolidated and managed freight deliveries and scheduling, as well as long-term storage and warehousing.
Adrian's main focus in the past two years has been on the FCDO-funded 'High Volume Transport' research project "Decision Support Systems for Resilient Strategic Transport Networks in Low Income Countries", engaged in developing scenarios of change for long-distance transport systems, with East Africa as a case-study region, and applying them alongside transport Sustainability Indicators developed as part of the project. The online Decision Support Tool has recently been made available at https://east-africa.infrastructureresilience.org/.
Research projects
Completed projects
Publications
Biography
Recent projects are listed below:
- Decision Support Systems for Resilient Strategic Transport Networks in Low Income Countries – developing scenarios of change for long-distance transport systems, with East Africa as a case-study region. The scenarios will help inform the Climate Risk and Resilience Assessment and Sustainability Indicator development which will form part of the online Decision Support Tool deliverable.
- DAFNI Champion – acting as an advocate within the University and wider transport community for promoting and disseminating information about the new Data and Analytics Facility for National Infrastructure (DAFNI).
- NISMOD-TRD Developing applications of the ITRC-NISMOD transport model – Promoting the application of ITRC’s NISMODv2 Transport model, and developing relationships with key stakeholders in national, regional and local transport policy
- Pathways to Decarbonise Transport in England’s Economic Heartland – carrying out an assessment of different strategic approaches to decarbonising a regional transport system using transport modelling tools developed by ITRC.
- MISTRAL (Multi-Scale Infrastructure Systems Analytics) – developing scenarios and applying national modelling to the Oxford-Cambridge Arc and the wider region of England’s Economic Heartland. Development of general framework for national infrastructure assessment applied to different geo-political contexts (with a focus on Palestine and Curacao).
- Road Safety in Low Income Countries - undertaking a systematic review and producing a state of knowledge paper on road safety in low income countries. Particular focus was placed on underreporting, limited data conditions, unobserved heterogeneity, emerging technologies and new forms of data, novel approaches, expected increases in traffic volumes, dumping of old vehicles and advanced vehicle safety features.
- The Resilience Shift – carrying out a scoping review of literature relating to resilience in connected infrastructure systems.
- ITRC (Infrastructure Transitions Research Consortium) – research programme on the long-term dynamics of interdependent infrastructure systems. One of four editors for Cambridge University Press Book “The Future of National Infrastructure: A System-of-Systems Approach”.
- Monitoring and evaluation for ‘A Better Connected South Hampshire’, Solent Transport’s (formerly Transport for South Hampshire) Local Sustainable Transport Fund (LSTF) large bid, and for the LSTF Carbon Case Study (South Hampshire, Greater Manchester and Leicestershire).