Digital Roads

This partnership started 10 years ago, when Costain started a collaborative research programme with Highways England and the University of Cambridge that sponsored 27 PhD studentships and led to the establishment of three major efforts: (i) the Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction, which grew into the National Research Facility for Infrastructure Sensing to develop new methods for infrastructure data collection and analysis using sensors. Our joint work through this activity has collectively shaped national policy; (ii) the EPSRC Materials for Life project that led to a Programme Grant called Resilient Materials for Life, which led to the first UK demonstration of self-healing structures on the A465 road scheme; and (iii) the two EPSRC Centres for Doctoral Training in Future Infrastructure and the Built Environment, which led to Costain acquiring SSL, a data technology company that has accelerated our technology service transformation. All this steered the team to co-create an integrated and focused partnership programme through co-creation workshops, the outcome of which is the proposed Digital Roads partnership.
Digital Roads is inherently a concept for how to disrupt the roads infrastructure sector in its entirety. We envision a future where every road is made of smart materials, has its own digital twin, and can measure and monitor its own performance. This will make roads considerably cheaper, more reliable, and safer. Our ambition is therefore to make roads (i) out of smart materials aware of their state and properties, (ii) documented in Digital Twins and monitored automatically, (iii) maintained proactively, and (iv) able to serve additional functionalities, therefore bringing automation efficiency to the road network.
The Digital Roads concept rethinks roads as an integrated physical and digital product and associated lifecycle processes that continuously interact with each other to ensure efficiency and strong performance in terms of cost,...