Technology is changing the way infrastructure is designed, delivered and operated. The Rapid Engineering Model (REM) was developed by National Highways and is just one of the tools we are now using to increase the speed, quality and safety of road design. This will also form the basis of the creation of a company-wide Digital Twin.
So far, we have developed 11 schemes using the REM workflow. The time to produce the operational concepts for these schemes has decreased from around nine months for traditional approaches to a matter of weeks. Some aspects of preliminary design timescales have decreased from around a year to just eight weeks.
Alongside REM, we are using drones to build 3D maps of the network. We have recently mapped all 120 miles of M25 and are putting this data to immediate use on construction sites. Sharing this data across project teams will help to reduce carbon emissions by 95% (compared to traditional surveys) improve safety outcomes by reducing exposure of road workers to live traffic and minimise customer journey disruption caused by lane closures.