Project overview
This multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary project has helped inform the analysis, planning and design of national infrastructure, through the development and demonstration of new decision support tools, and working with partners in government and industry.
The research dealt at a national scale with energy, transport, water, waste, and information and communication technologies (ICT) systems. For these systems, the programme developed new methods for analysing performance, risks and interdependencies; provided a virtual environment in which to test strategies for long term investment; and increased understanding of how alternative strategies perform with respect to policy constraints such as: reliability and security of supply, cost, carbon emissions, and adaptability to socio-demographic, economic and climate change.
Following on from the Fast-Track Assessment (FTA) undertaken during the first year of the project, Transportation Group (TRG) produced a model capable of forecasting transport demand and capacity within and between 142 UK zones for the period up to 2100, which includes ‘soft’ interactions with models of other infrastructure sectors to allow interdependencies between systems to be explicitly considered.
The model included road, rail, air and sea passenger and freight transport, with the ability to capture the impact of a number of potential policy and technological options such as infrastructure construction, alternative pricing regimes and improved vehicle fuel efficiencies.
The ITRC transport model has been used together with the other sectoral models to forecast the impact of a range of different transport strategies under different future scenarios for population, energy prices and the economy.
Visualisation tools have also been developed within the consortium to allow future analysis of these results. A book giving further details and results from the project was published by Cambridge University Press in February 2016.
TRG staff were also involved in a 4-month collaboration with Infrastructure UK, using the ITRC models, databases and visualisation tools to assess the impact of the National Infrastructure Pipeline, helping to inform decision-makers and planners on how future investments should be prioritised.
Please see further details on the ITRC project, and the subsequent EPSRC grant, MISTRAL.
