The Heritage Science Data Service (HSDS) will provide key Digital Research Services enabling RICHeS to transform heritage science and conservation research (HSCR) and its capacity to advance understanding, preservation and management of UK heritage. It will offer a single discovery point to distributed facilities, cross-disciplinary expertise, and shared data as a research resource. This new co-ordinated approach brings considerable advantages, enabling international leadership and open innovation, including advances in AI and data science. Heritage science and conservation research has significant digital infrastructure requirements. It employs a broad range of technologies including: digital imaging (3D laser scanning, photogrammetry, X-ray, infrared, hyperspectral, XRF scanning etc), remote sensing (LiDAR, geophysics), 3D modelling, dating (dendrochronology, C14), many analytical approaches, non-invasive or on samples (stable isotopes, Ancient DNA, Zooms, SEM-EDX, FTIR, GC-MS, HPLC etc) and large-scale facilities (neutron, synchrotron). Many complementary methods are used in tandem, generating numerous datasets (routinely at gigabyte scale) requiring active data management to ensure long-term preservation and re-use. They are a primary resource, generally born-digital without paper surrogates. If lost they cannot be reacquired; it is essential they are managed and curated according to the FAIR principles. The HSDS will curate a substantial body of new data across RICHeS and be the national discovery tool for UK heritage science. Easier access to this difficult-to-find data through digital services unlocks its potential for research and wider impact in the heritage sector and beyond. It will be a digital skills development incubator, with an interoperable distributed structure on an unprecedented, transformative scale. It will widen access to advanced scientific research facilities for arts and humanities, heritage and archaeological professionals, researchers, engineers and scientists, through: (i) a catalogue of research facilities, reference collections and expertise; (ii) an aggregating function, making data collections navigable and searchable; (iii) a FAIR repository for research data, encouraging Access and Re-use. HSDS will be developed and managed by the Archaeology Data Service (ADS), an innovative CoreTrustSeal repository managing archaeological and heritage science data since 1996, in partnership with the STFC Hartree Centre, a high-performance computing, data analytics and AI research facility, formed in 2012. HSDS also brings together key UK heritage bodies covering England, Scotland and Wales. As initial data providers with associated digital expertise, they enable a 'design with data' approach, with sector coverage complementing ADS, and include the British Museum (BM), British Geological Survey (BGS), National Gallery (NG), The National Archives (TNA), Natural History Museum (NHM), Historic England (HE), Historic Environment Scotland (HES) and Museum Wales (NMW). Collaboration with the Museum Data Service (MDS) will ensure interoperability with metadata drawn from smaller museums. Cascading grants will provide crucial support for additional partners and wider coverage of user-needs, also fostering co-development of Virtual Research Environments for visualising and interrogating. Internationally, HSDS will provide the UK DIGILAB hub for E-RIHS (European Research Infrastructure for Heritage Science), and will work with the Getty Conservation Institute to integrate data from laboratories using their Arches for Science platform. NG and TNA will work with Kartography to integrate data through the ResearchSpace platform.

Infrastructure systems such as water, transport and energy are vital to British society and the economy. It is very important that these systems are able to continue to function effectively in the future, but it is difficult to predict the conditions that they will need to operate under because of climate change, social change and economic changes. For this reason infrastructure needs to be adaptable and resilient, able to bounce back from whatever extreme events and general trends occur in the future. In order to achieve this infrastructure may look quite different to how it does today. We may have more renewable energy, more recycled water, and more public transport, walking and cycling, and our cities could look and operate quite differently as a result. Designing infrastructure for the future is a very complex task that needs to take into account the values, experiences and requirements of local communities and everyday people. Engineers and experts are good at developing technical solutions to well defined problems, but they have not been as successful at understanding the needs and expectations of local communities. Engineers have good methods for taking into account physical, enviromental and economic factors, but they need new tools to be able to better understand and account for social factors in their designs. Local communities will also have important roles to play in adapting to climate change and other uncertain events in the future, so it is important that local communities and engineers come together to decide what is important in designing future infrastructure. This fellowship will help Dr Sarah Bell to learn from good examples of how local communities can be involved in infrastructure decisions. Her research team will work with communities and engineers to define methods and tools to allow for better integration of community needs and ideas into infrastructure design. These tools and methods might include checklists or surveys to quickly understand what communities need and what they want for the future, calculators to help engineers working with communities to quickly calculate the environmental impacts and costs of different ideas for infrastructure, and risk assessments to understand the problems that might occur if communities are not involved in engineering design and the benefits that might be possible if they are.

Since the turn of the century there has been a reduction in UK energy independence. While this trend has recently started to reverse, there is still a pressing need to further increase energy independence, as well as continue reduction in total consumption, and work towards becoming a carbon free energy nation. The Climate Change Act 2008 mandates the UK government to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by at least 80% (based on 1990 levels) by 2050. In total, domestic, commercial and industrial heat provision in the UK accounts for around one third of all greenhouse gas emissions and 40% of energy consumption. Hence tackling heating (and cooling) for all buildings is essential for addressing the energy problem. One energy efficiency solution which must play a future role in both demand reduction and decarbonisation is ground thermal energy storage. Such systems typically comprise some form of ground heat exchanger connected to a heat pump and a low temperature building heating delivery system (and/or higher temperature cooling delivery system). Traditional schemes use special purpose drilled boreholes as the ground heat exchanger, but since the 1980's building foundations developed as ground heat exchanger have also been used. Foundation ground heat exchangers are now becoming more common place, but there remains significant opportunities to use other underground structures for heat transfer and storage, thus contributing to the delivery of sustainable heating and cooling for overlying buildings. Retaining walls, tunnels and water/waste water pipes can all potentially be used as so called energy geostructures, where they exchange and store heat as well as performing their original structural function. However, despite a number of trials, most of these energy geostructures are a long way from routine adoption. Rigorous assessment of both their energy potential and how they are constructed is lacking. There are no routine design guides or standards and where schemes have been, or are being developed, they usually involve expensive and complicated analyses typically conducted in collaboration with a university partner. There are challenges in terms of energy assessment and further barriers to adoption in the requirement for adjacent consumers of the supplied energy. There is also a need for a heat/cool distribution network to reach the consumers which may not be currently in place. This proposal will tackle the challenges relating to routine implementation of energy geostructures, including design, construction and heat/cool delivery. This will encourage future adoption and help the development of the UK ground energy market.

High-speed rail lines, at ever increasing speeds and distances, are in development both in the UK and world-wide, but up-front capital expenditure can potentially be a major inhibiting factor both to the client and also in the eyes of the public. Cost reductions for these lines could be achievable if the initial costs of the physical construction, the duration of construction and the land take could be reduced. All three of these costs can potentially be reduced for embankments if the industry were to move towards a novel embankment replacement system. In addition embankment replacement systems could significantly improve the performance of the track structure as the dynamic properties of the contained material can be better controlled. However, such technology requires significant performance evaluation and the development of appropriate design guidance before UK industry can justifiably implement it in a project. This project therefore aims to evaluate and produce design guidance for two novel embankment replacement systems as a means to potentially reduce the cost of constructing new high-speed railway lines (particularly in urban environments) and improve the overall track behaviour and hence passenger experience.

Large-scale failures to critical national infrastructures (electricity, transportation, water, etc.), due to extreme weather events, have highlighted the need for understanding systemic risks to such infrastructures and their subsequent consequences to society, businesses and industry. The flooding and storms in UK in 2007 and 2013-14 provide evidence of the severity of such problems. Though systemic risks are important, multiple reports, including the Department for Transport's Resilience Review in 2014 highlight the lack of understanding and accountability for a network-of-networks approach to national infrastructures, with limited knowledge of systemic vulnerabilities and risks across interdependent infrastructures. Hence it is timely to develop system-of-systems national infrastructure models that inform risk assessment and resilience planning. This program of innovation proposes to develop innovative tools to support this development. The key objective of this program of innovation is to create a spatial analysis toolkit that combines data and models for multi-hazard risk and resilience estimation of interdependent national infrastructure networks. The toolkit will be used to assess and communicate risks to electricity (transmission and distribution), transport (road, rail, air and sea) networks for Great Britain and water (distribution) networks for Scotland. Through the participation of key stakeholders this program of innovation is translation-focused, has high innovation potential, is timely with high potential impact, provides value for money, and above all is relevant to the industry. The key stakeholders supporting this program of innovation include ARUP, Department for Transport, HR Wallingford, HS2, and Scottish Water, who are strategic partners with the NERC ERIIC program. Also JBA Group, a key environment consultant is involved. Project stakeholders will harness the innovation from this project to enable better targeting of resources for risk reduction and resilience planning for the critical national infrastructure.