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During the 99th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board (TRB), the GITECO Research Group (University of Cantabria) presented a research on the performance of porous asphalt pavement for extreme weather conditions.

This annual renowned congress was held in Washington DC (USA) from 12 to 16 January gathering more than 13000 professionals from the transport sector. The GITECO team leaded by Prof. Daniel Castro-Fresno and Carlos Slebi-Acebedo (visiting researcher, Catholic University of Colombia). GITECO is leading the FORESEE research on the road pavement with the goal to achieve highest resilience results in case of extreme events.

The poster presented was entitled “A decision support model applied to additive selection in Porous Hot Mix Asphalt” and “Study of the effect of polyolefin-aramid fibers on PA mixtures” linked to the research outputs from WP3 on the performance of a PA mixture reinforced with polyolefin-aramid fibers. The functional and mechanical performance of the mixture was assessed by different volumetric and mechanical tests including total air voids, interconnected air voids, Cantabro particle loss in dry and wet conditions and binder drainage test

List of materials, results can be found here: PDF_TRB

On 29 November, a delegation of FORESEE (Tecnalia and SRG Chairman) presented in Madrid the ongoing research to ADIF that is the Spanish state-owned railway infrastructure manager part of the Ministry of Development. ADIF was founded in 2005 responsible for the management of most of Spain’s railway infrastructure including the track, signalling and stations.

Discussions during the technical workshop focussed on the future outputs related to resilience and asset management in transport infrastructures. Concretely, experts shared knowledge and experience gained during the first Deliverables prepared by the project on the “Guidelines to measure Level of Service and Resilience in infrastructures” and the “Guideline to set target Levels of Service and Resilience for infrastructures”

A main concern for the railways managers in Spain is to promise and extend the lifetime of the current network while ensuring highest levels of quality, safety, security and service. In this sense, adaptability to impact of climate change represents a priority for Public Administrations to which the FORESEE Methodology can highly contribute.

ADIF and FORESEE will enhance future collaboration as members of the Stakeholders Reference Group. This body aims at exchanging knowledge and good practices involving main actors in the transport infrastructure sector both from roads and railways.

For further information, please contact Iñaki Beltrán: [email protected]

The 26^th World Road Congress, held in Abu Dhabi (UAE) from 6 to 10 October, gathered more than 6000 participants from 144 countries, more than 3700 delegates and 40 Ministers and Vice-Ministers from all over the world.

This event is organised every four years presenting the results of different working groups at PIARC level on specific topics related to road infrastructure. A main challenge for Road Administrations is the improvement of the resilience in the plan, design, construction, operation and maintenance of the transport network.

Representatives from the FORESEE Project attended the event and had the opportunity to discuss with different authorities and stakeholders about the EU research and the Horizon 2020 funding scheme. From the engineering perspective, specific work should be completed to mitigate main risks as climate change and extreme weather, ageing of infrastructure, natural and human-made disasters.

A main objective of FORESEE is to align efforts and enhance collaboration with road authorities to develop a methodology that ensure functioning of critical assets in extraordinary cases. In this sense, the Stakeholders Reference Group will be the platform to build the collaboration bridge between the FORESEE experts and public authorities being PIARC one of the core organisations involved.

On 17th of September, the FORESEE Stakeholders Reference Group organised the first workshop at Telespazio in London under the tittle “Road and Railway networks’ resilience strengthening through satellite monitoring”.

Linear infrastructures and assets studied in isolation give an incomplete view of resilience for transport assets. Only when asset condition analysis is integrated with its environment, the full dynamics of the infrastructure come to life providing improvements for infrastructure resilience assessment. However, improvements can be achieved by using satellite technologies at regional scale with GIS based environmental assessments and at asset scale with Satellite Structural Health Monitoring (S-SHMTM).

Discussions leaded by Chairman Engineer Jesús Rodríguez animated the participation of around fifty stakeholders from the road and railways sectors covering three main topics:

• The global impact of almost 20 years of satellite derived monitoring data in the transport sector;
• FORESEE developments in satellite monitoring solutions and other latest developments addressing the needs and requests of end users being civil engineers, clients, contractors and surveyors to contribute towards the digital transformation of the industry to provide a continuous, dynamic and efficient monitoring system;
• Challenges faced when designing and implementing tools for resilient transport infrastructure, being considered in the Resilience Shift initiative.

The aim of the Stakeholders Reference Group is to channelize inputs from third parties which could benefit from the results of the project. In this sense, the dedicated discussion on satellite technologies proved to be a successful experience showing how innovation in form of satellite technologies can complement current transport management schemes to improve resilience in key engineering assets.

For further information about the workshop or Stakeholders Reference Groups please contact Sheryl Lynch ([email protected]) or Jose Diez ([email protected]).

The FORESEE Guideline to measure service provided by, and resilience of, transport infrastructure subjected to extreme events is available now.

The document provides guidance to managers of multi-modal transport systems allowing them to determine specifically for their transport systems how simulations should be conducted, and how indicators should be developed.

The guideline is for managers of different types of transport systems, for different scales of transport systems, for different types of extreme events and taking into consideration the different types of service being provided. It is devised to be used by managers with different ranges of time and expertise.

Its main principles are to objectively measure the service being provided, to systematically consider how this service will be affected when an extreme event occurs, and to consider how infrastructure aspects, organisation aspects and environmental aspects of transport systems affect resilience. Its use can enable managers of transport systems to obtain a complete and objective view of the resilience of their transport systems, and to obtain objective comparisons of the resilience of multi-transport systems.

Within FORESEE Project, the guideline will be used to develop resilience indicators for six multimodal case studies in Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal. The specific indicators will be unveiled at the end of the project in March 2022.

Download the document here: FORESEE_D1.1_Guideline to measure Levels of Service and resilience in in…