News

This edition features articles on the human factor as decisive element in engineering projects, development of guidelines on services and resilience of transport infrastructure, analysis of the Winter Resilience Programme developed by Heathrow airport.

Read the full stories here.

On 2^nd April, the General Assembly was held in Milano hosted by RINA Consulting and leaded by project coordinator Tecnalia.

The project has reached its 8^th month. Some Work Packages has already delivered first outputs after intensive efforts from all the partners.

A main Deliverable will be released shortly (D1.1) presenting the Guideline to measure Levels of Service and resilience in infrastructures. This Deliverable will produce key materials to be used by transport infrastructure manager in the case studies of FORESEE.

The Stakeholder Reference Group will organise the first web seminar on 9^th April moderated by Chairman Jesus Rodríguez. This expert forum is formed by representatives form industry, research organisations, academia, transport authorities and operators. FORESEE aims at gathering know-how not only from the consortium but also considering guidance from external stakeholders.

Next FORESEE meeting will take place in London in September.

The FORESEE consortium are delighted to announce the launch of our Inaugural Newsletter. FAC have worked with ERF on collating information on this H2020 project. This edition contains a project description, meet the team section, and a video with the Coordinator, introducing the main objectives and ambitions of FORESEE. Click the link to find out more!

View the newsletter here: https://spark.adobe.com/page/x0ipul5LZPY1I/

On 13 and 14 of November, the European Construction Technology Platform held the conference “When EU Construction industry shapes high-tech Sustainable Built Environment” gathering main industry representatives and European Commission officials.

A main element for the discussion was the contribution of Research & Development programmes to achieve a high technological and sustainable built environment. Representatives from FORESEE attended the event raisin awareness about the importance of resilience for any critical engineering transport asset.

Any damage, destruction or disruption by extreme nature or human events has a significant negative impact on our society and economic development of the European regions. Maintenance is a key precondition to ensure a smooth transport for goods and mobility for people.

However, current transport infrastructure is slowly approaching its end-of-life and then becoming more fragile. Bridges, tunnels and strategic sections are suffering more and more of aging processes. In addition, extreme events, as those exacerbated by climate change, are posing significant and additional challenges to their operation and maintenance. The situation is introducing uncertainties for long-term investments and management plans.

In this sense, FORESEE will develop a toolkit to facilitate transport operators a good management of unexpected disruptive events. During the conference, other solutions were presented with complementary approaches and methodologies built upon existing knowledge and outcomes from various projects (EU-CIRCLE, RAGTIME).

The new EU research collaborative project FORESEE organised the kick-off meeting at Tecnalia headquarters in Bilbao (Spain).

Researchers will work during the next 42 months developing a toolkit able to reduce the impact of disruptive events on the transport assets (bridges, tunnels, pavement, slopes, terminals) and facilitating the deployment of mobility contingency plans for citizens and freight in such critical situations.

FORESEE aims at increasing resilience of transport infrastructure in case of human and natural hazards as extreme weather events, landslides and earthquakes. Its innovative element relies on a multimodal approach both for railway and road networks by implementing EU priorities in a long-term perspective combined with asset management strategies. In addition, the research will establish preventive maintenance and upgrading actions as claimed by the ERF in different during last years.

The European consortium is composed of 18 partners gathering main actors involved in the infrastructure lifetime as road managers, developers, research centres, universities, standardisation bodies or road organisations.

Transport authorities, operators and users will benefit of the FORESEE solution which will be able to extend lifetime and good performance of the infrastructure.