Research themes
- Road Asset Management
- Railway Asset Management
- Railway Economics
- Railway Maintenance
Research activity
Road and Railway Asset Management
1) Resilience of the UK transport network to the potential impact of climate change
Co-investigator FUTURENET Project
Scope: A consortium led by the University of Birmingham been awarded funding for this major four year, £1.5million, research project starting in June 2009 to examine how to make the UK’s transport systems resilient to climate change. This innovative project will identify what the UK’s transport system will look like in 2050 and investigate to ensure that it will be able to cope with the effects of climate change.
To fully appreciate the impact of climate change on our transport systems it is important that we understand not just how it looks and is used now, but how that will change over the coming decades. So to assess the resilience of the transport network in 2050 it will be necessary to take into account the likely technology and infrastructure changes, as well as changes in climate and extreme weather events.
The project will attempt to answer questions such as: what will be the critical thresholds of extreme weather that cause disruption or accidents; how susceptible are different modes to extreme events; and what are the likely implications for maintenance and renewal costs?
2) Road Asset Management
a. CRISPS – Climate resilient sustainable road pavement surfacings.
Team Leader. The aim of this 18-month project is to achieve an affordable high-volume road resilient to climate change and traffic demands, by assessing the suitability of three global best practice types of road surfacing technologies for use in LICs to counter the impacts of climate change, namely Modified Epoxy Chip Seals (MECS), Modified Epoxy Asphalt Surfaces (MEAS) and Fibre Mastic Asphalt (FMA) respectively. To achieve the above a team of world leading academic institutions, practitioners and an international road membership organisation have been assembled. The consortium is led by the University of Birmingham (UoB) in collaboration with the University of Auckland (UoA), the Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) and the International Road Federation (IRF) Geneva.
b. PhD project – Road deterioration modelling
b. PhD project – Potential impacts of climate change on road drainage
3) Railway Asset Management
a. PhD project – Railway maintenance standards
4) Railway Economics
a. PhD project – Railway Investment Appraisal
5) Railway Maintenance
a. Fines migration