Project Partners: Arup, Atkins, Canal & River Trust, Environment Agency, Geosense, High Speed Two, Highways England, ITM Monitoring, Kier, National Grid, Network Rail, Rail Safety & Standards Board, Scottish Canals, Transport Scotland. The Challenge: The development of the Proactive Infrastructure Monitoring and Evaluation (PRIME) system is driven by the increasing rate and severity of failures in flood defence, transportation, and utilities earthworks. This is due to aging assets (many canal and rail earthworks are over a hundred years old) and more extreme weather events (e.g. the extreme rainfall during winter 2013-14 & 2015-16). Asset failures are enormously expensive, costing hundreds of millions of pounds per year in the UK alone, not to mention risks to human health and disruption of transport systems, utilities and the wider economy. Assessment of the condition of geotechnical assets is essential for cost effective maintenance and prevention of hazardous failure events. Early identification of deteriorating condition generally allows low cost preventative remediation to be undertaken (post failure interventions are typically ten times more expensive) and reduces the risk of catastrophic failures. Conventional approaches to condition monitoring are often inadequate for predicting earthwork instability. They are heavily dependent on surface observations - i.e. walk-over surveys or airborne data collection. These approaches cannot detect the subsurface precursors to failure events; instead they identify failure once it has begun. There is growing recognition among infrastructure asset owners, managers, and consultants that automated monitoring technologies have the potential to reduce these costs and risks by providing continuous condition information and early warnings of failure. Aims & Objectives: The primary objective is to deliver a new remote condition monitoring and decision-support system for assessing the internal condition of safety critical geotechnical assets. This will be realised by implementing a fully automated software workflow for data analysis and information delivery, building upon the recently developed PRIME hardware platform. The integrated PRIME system (i.e. hardware & software) will combine emerging geophysical ground imaging technology with wireless telemetry, 'big data' handling, and web portal access. It will form the basis of a new generation of intelligent decision-support technology capable of 'seeing inside' vulnerable earthworks in near-real-time using diagnostic imaging methods routinely used in medical physics. By the end of this project, the software and hardware will be demonstrated to technology readiness level (TRL) 7 at new and existing stakeholder sites, ready for commercialisation and use by the wider stakeholder community. Benefits: The key benefits of PRIME to asset owners include cost savings through minimising unnecessary renewals and providing early warning of failure events, time savings associated with fewer manual site visits, and risk reduction by preventing dangerous earthworks failures, and minimising the need for people to enter potentially hazardous operational environments. Geotechnical monitoring providers, consultants & contractors will benefit through new cutting-edge geotechnical monitoring services and, for the first time, near-real-time volumetric subsurface monitoring information. Key Deliverables & Outputs: - New software to fully automate PRIME data processing and information delivery - including a web-based decision support dashboard. - Demonstration of the complete PRIME system at existing rail and waterways pilot sites, and new highways, power transmission and flood defence sites - establishing TRL 7 (demonstration in an operational environment). - A commercialisation strategy agreed with project partners to ensure technology translation to the stakeholder community. Duration: 18 months Cost: £183,000 (at 80% FEC)

This proposal is concerned with the renewal of the Salford IMRC which was initially established in January 2002. This proposal will extent the life of the Salford Centre for Research and Innovation (SCRI) in the built and human environment, until 2011 and further increase the impact that the centre has created in the first five years of its lifecycle. The rolling research agenda and evolving vision of the Centre has been very well received by the industrial and academic circles, as it has been made explicit by the international assessment panels and this renewal aims to firmly establish the world class status of the centre and increase the performance of UK Plc. The centre brings together significant expertise from three research institutes within the university of Salford and aims to continue its collaboration with more that 60 partners in the industrial and academic communities internationally.