Globally, national infrastructure is facing significant challenges: - Ageing assets: Much of the UK's existing infrastructure is old and no longer fit for purpose. In its State of the Nation Infrastructure 2014 report the Institution of Civil Engineers stated that none of the sectors analysed were "fit for the future" and only one sector was "adequate for now". The need to future-proof existing and new infrastructure is of paramount importance and has become a constant theme in industry documents, seminars, workshops and discussions. - Increased loading: Existing infrastructure is challenged by the need to increase load and usage - be that number of passengers carried, numbers of vehicles or volume of water used - and the requirement to maintain the existing infrastructure while operating at current capacity. - Changing climate: projections for increasing numbers and severity of extreme weather events mean that our infrastructure will need to be more resilient in the future. These challenges require innovation to address them. However, in the infrastructure and construction industries tight operating margins, industry segmentation and strong emphasis on safety and reliability create barriers to introducing innovation into industry practice. CSIC is an Innovation and Knowledge Centre funded by EPSRC and Innovate UK to help address this market failure, by translating world leading research into industry implementation, working with more than 40 industry partners to develop, trial, provide and deliver high-quality, low cost, accurate sensor technologies and predictive tools which enable new ways of monitoring how infrastructure behaves during construction and asset operation, providing a whole-life approach to achieving sustainability in an integrated way. It provides training and access for industry to source, develop and deliver these new approaches to stimulate business and encourage economic growth, improving the management of the nation's infrastructure and construction industry. Our collaborative approach, bringing together leaders from industry and academia, accelerates the commercial development of emerging technologies, and promotes knowledge transfer and industry implementation to shape the future of infrastructure. Phase 2 funding will enable CSIC to address specific challenges remaining to implementation of smart infrastructure solutions. Over the next five years, to overcome these barriers and create a self-sustaining market in smart infrastructure, CSIC along with an expanded group of industry and academic partners will: - Create the complete, innovative solutions that the sector needs by integrating the components of smart infrastructure into systems approaches, bringing together sensor data and asset management decisions to improve whole life management of assets and city scale infrastructure planning; spin-in technology where necessary, to allow demonstration of smart technology in an integrated manner. - Continue to build industry confidence by working closely with partners to demonstrate and deploy new smart infrastructure solutions on live infrastructure projects. Develop projects on behalf of industry using seed-funds to fund hardware and consumables, and demonstrate capability. - Generate a compelling business case for smart infrastructure solutions together with asset owners and government organisations based on combining smarter information with whole life value models for infrastructure assets. Focus on value-driven messaging around the whole system business case for why smart infrastructure is the future, and will strive to turn today's intangibles into business drivers for the future. - Facilitate the development and expansion of the supply chain through extending our network of partners in new areas, knowledge transfer, smart infrastructure standards and influencing policy.

Our work brings together two important areas of science and engineering: wireless communications technology and glaciology. Using innovative techniques currently being developed for wireless communications to install a network of sensors, we will increase our understanding of how the world's large ice sheets will respond to climate change, while the knowledge gained by experimenting with wireless networks in an extreme environment will be of benefit to engineers developing the next generation of wireless networks such as mobile phone networks. Around the edge of the Greenland Ice Sheet are outlet glaciers, which allow ice to flow from the centre of the ice sheet into the sea. Where the ice meets the sea, icebergs are formed, and about half of the ice which leaves the ice sheet does so in this way. These glaciers are thought to be very sensitive to changes in air and ocean temperatures, but we do not yet know enough about them to be able to predict future changes, or understand those already observed. The processes leading to iceberg formation ('calving') are particularly important, but poorly understood. In particular, there is an urgent need to address the question of how changes in glacier flow ('dynamics') relate to changes in terminus position and calving rates. Does one drive the other, or is it more complex than that? To understand this, we need to know what the primary mechanisms are for calving in Greenland outlet glaciers, and we need characterise these mechanisms in a consistent, quantitative way across all such glaciers. Only then can the relevant processes be represented in computer models of the ice sheet and its outlet glaciers, allowing us to improve our predictions of how they will respond to climate change. To improve our understanding, it is vital to have detailed observations of iceberg calving events, but these are hard to obtain because of the difficulty of placing and maintaining instrumentation on the heavily-crevassed ice surface. To overcome the problem of getting the right observations, a network of expendable GPS receivers will be deployed on Helheim Glacier, an important calving glacier in south-east Greenland. Using special data processing techniques, GPS can be used to make measurements which are accurate to a few centimetres. The GPS receivers will be connected to each other and to a base station via a network of expendable, low-power wireless transceivers. The design of the network will mean that data can still be collected if parts of it are lost: it will be self-healing. The innovative nature of the network and its components make it economically and logistically possible to deploy a large number of sensors by helicopter in the calving region of the glacier. During the lifetime of the project, we expect to observe several calving events in detail. The data from the GPS receivers will be combined with other data sources, from aircraft, satellites and stereo photography, to obtain an unprecedented insight into iceberg formation. The data will be combined with computer models of ice flow, enabling various theories about iceberg formation to be explored and tested. This part of the project has the potential to deliver new science well beyond the end of the funded work.