Research

The Digital Roads team will explore how Digital Twins, smart materials, data science and robotic monitoring can work together to develop a connected physical and digital road infrastructure system. 

The motivation behind the initiative is to make the vital road network safer and more resilient, by tackling structural decline. Delays represent 4.3 billion wasted labour hours a year, and road accident figures are high, with more than 27,000 deaths and serious injuries in 2019. Improvements could be delivered more efficiently through new ways of designing, building, operating and using roads. As well as reducing disruption for drivers, these steps would reduce the associated carbon emissions by around 50 per cent, and help to meet the target of zero injuries or deaths on the network by 2040.

Advances in information and materials science have the potential to enable the physical road infrastructure assets to be cognisant of their state and able to communicate it to their digital twin and robotic systems. This pairing of the physical and
digital worlds can allow monitoring of assets and analysis of data to provide insight, identify opportunities to solve problems before they occur, plan for the future by using simulations and make them safer, more efficient and more sustainable.

The research will encompass five key areas, exploring how they can work together to develop a connected physical and digital road infrastructure system, while being underpinned by sustainability.