Projects
PRECINCT – Preparedness and Resilience Enforcement for Critical Infrastructure Cascading Cyber-Physical Threats (2021 – 2023)
This is a major pan-European research project with 40 partners and a budget of €9.5 million. It focusses on connecting private and public critical infrastructure stakeholders to a common cyber-physical security management approach. This will deliver a protected territory for citizens and infrastructures, a ‘PRECINCT’ that can be replicated efficiently for a safer Europe.
The role of RDS will be to develop a “Critical Infrastructure Resilience Index”, supporting the identification of short- and long-term measures to enhance resilience. This will build on the RDS Directors’ previous work in risk and resilience analysis, asset lifecycle performance optimization and Risk Assessment of Ageing Infrastructure (RESILENS, SAFE10T, InfraRisk, RE-GEN).
For more info, see our website:
CERCOM - Circular Economy in Road COnstruction and Maintenance
The CERCOM project was funded under the CEDR 2020 Transnational Road Research Programme under the topic of Resource Efficiency and the Circular Economy. RDS are the project coordinators, leading a consortium of SMEs and research institutions across the UK, Denmark and the Netherlands. The primary aim of the CERCOM project is to produce recommendations and tools to help CEDR National Road Administrations (NRAs) implement the principles of the circular economy into procurement practices.
As well as acting as project coordinator, RDS are leading the development and roadmap to implementation of a risk-based analysis tool to to facilitate a step change in the adoption of Circular Economy principles in procurement and multi-lifecycle management by NRAs across Europe
For more info, see our website:
https://cercom.project.cedr.eu/
PIARC Special Project: Carbon Neutrality for the Road Sector (2022)
This is a PIARC Special Project to develop carbon neutral actions for National Road Authorities in collaboration with ITEN (International Transport Experts Network).
This project aims to identify actions being undertaken as well as potential new options to progress towards carbon neutrality for both High Income Countries and Low Middle Income Countries.
Net zero carbon and carbon neutrality represent two different approaches to combat climate change as follows:
- Net Zero Carbon which is reducing carbon emissions to as close to zero as possible, and
- Carbon Neutrality which is balancing carbon emissions by ‘offsetting’, i.e., separately removing carbon in the atmosphere to balance that which is emitted.
This project assesses the policies and strategies being adopted by National Road Authorities, and examines the technical solutions that are available for decarbonisation and corresponding potential carbon savings.
CEDR Bio: Measures to enhance biodiversity and address invasive species in road verges (2022)
In 2016, the Conference of European Road Directors (CEDR) commissioned two projects: EPIC Roads and ControlinRoad.
RDS developed a practical guide for non-experts outlining the final recommendations, addressing:
- Measures to enhance biodiversity on road verges, and
- How to deal with invasive alien plants.
ICARUS: Improving the uptake of Climate change Adaptation in the decision making processes of Road aUthoritieS (2022-2024)
ICARUS is a CEDR project funded through the Call 2021 topic of Climate Change Resilience funded by Denmark, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
For the majority of European National Road Authorities, incorporating climate change and resilience concepts in decision making is a balancing act between ambitions, the newest approaches and technologies vs pragmatic and proven practices, information needs vs data availability, expected service levels and investments.
How do you build and implement the business case for resilience via adaptation, balancing the service levels that the road network needs to achieve with the costs and benefits for enhancing resilience?
The ICARUS project seeks to answer this – we believe that a better understanding and assessment of the balance between service levels, cost and benefits of measures is key for implementation of climate change resilience.
For more info, see our website:
ReNew: Resilience-centric Smart, Green, Networked EU Inland Waterways (2022-2025)
This Horizon Europe work aims to harmonise sustainability and resilience across European inland waterways. ReNEW represents a multidisciplinary group composed of 24 participants from 11 countries of the European Union capable of playing a key role in supporting the transition of Inland Waterway Transport (IWT) to a smart, green, sustainable and climate-resilient sector.
To achieve this, the project will build on previous results, will capitalise on cooperation opportunities with ongoing projects and initiatives and will deliver:
1. An interdisciplinary IWT Resilience and Sustainability decision-support framework;
2. Targeted innovative infrastructure resilience and sustainability solutions building on autonomy developments and maturing green energy options;
3. A Green Resilient IWT Dataspace and generic Digital Twin providing primarily data sharing between infrastructure monitoring, RIS and traffic management and emergency systems and climate solutions;
4. Four Living Labs designed to provide exemplars focusing on integrated IW and hinterland infrastructure and a LL addressing specifically inland waterway resilience;
5. ReNEW Outreach and Upscale activities designed to maximise impact pathways.
