British Science Week: changing and adapting to increase the SRN’s resilience and sustainability

What has been your involvement in the Roads Research Alliance to date?

“The theme that my research comes under is ‘Digital Twins’, which involves creating virtual replicas of physical infrastructure — in this case, the Strategic Road Network (SRN). 

“In most definitions, digital twins have bidirectional information flow: from physical to digital and from digital to physical. My research focuses on the process of creating a digital road network from a physical asset. To construct this manually would take a lot of time, so my aim is to be able to use raw data to make this process automatic. 

“The data that I use comes from multiple sources including point clouds, RGB (colour) images, thermal images, and Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) — and what I’m looking to do is bring this all together using artificial intelligence (AI). This will help create a digital environment that includes all components of the road infrastructure, including the road barriers, light poles, pavements, and well as defects on pavement, or even invisible defect in subsurface. 

“Ultimately, I want to use the data to be able to detect defects that aren’t visible from the road surface, so we can pre-empt the maintenance that is required on the roads before they become a problem.”

The theme of this year’s British Science Week is ‘Change and Adapt’. How would you like to see the industry do that? 

“I believe that the work I’m doing can bring benefits to almost all stakeholders, including National Highways and the partners involved. For my research to have a robust AI model, having high-quality data shared with me is extremely important. 

“Benefits include better resource allocation, reducing long-term costs, saving time, and carbon reduction. If we have a well-developed digital twin platform, the maintenance plan could be optimised on this virtual platform. Based on the historic data, the digital twin platform can predict which sections of the road need to be maintained urgently, and the potential labour costs, resource, CO2 emitted, and time needed can be computed. 

“If we get to a point where we can implement this platform, it will greatly help us improve the road network’s resilience and reduce the need for manual intervention.

“The research could also be used and applied to other sectors, too.”