What can smart water and wastewater networks learn from smart highways.

Why Smart Highways?

In 2000, the Highways Agency (HA) developed a vision of what a major road would look like in 2010. It involved advanced information to the road users, control of the road space through live message signs and management of personnel to respond to incidents. There was a clear political mandate for change. The road widening programme had been cancelled and the HA had to sweat the assets and proactively manage them to meet congestion targets.

The HA had looked at what other road authorities across the EU were doing to learn from the best. At Mouchel our task was to make it happen, to move if from research to real life and implement Active Traffic Management (ATM). We had to prove four things:

• That the road could be operated in this manner
• That the technology worked
• That there was a business case
• And most importantly, that it was safe.

From Asset Manager to Network Operator

The HA was moving from being an Asset Manager to being a Network Operator – where the focus was on customer outcomes, such as accurate and reliable information on signs, rather than just building assets. Building and maintaining assets remained important, but operating was a whole new way of thinking. It brought with it a new set of responsibilities and a new set of relationships. These included a new relationship with motorists who were now seen as customers to be served.

The challenge was how to engage with a new wide range of stakeholders to explain to them how an intelligent road network would operate. This needed clear and simple messages and good ways to put them across; explaining the way the road would operate. These relationships were not just one way. It was important to explain what the stakeholders would need to do differently and how those procedures would work; but it was also important to listen to understand their view of the difficulties and the issues.

The proposed new way of operating the motorways brought with it some new responsibilities. The HA now had to consider what happened when their assets or the management system failed. What were the impacts on drivers and other stakeholders? This required a framework to understand failure modes and effects and a risk and hazard analysis. To achieve this we studied the practice in the rail and nuclear industries used to develop a formal safety case and produced this for the managed motorways.

Operational Regime

One important clear message was the concept of Operational Regimes. Different ways of operating the road for different conditions but where each regime was pre-defined. The simplest regime was a standard motorway running as normal, another was using the hardshoulder as a traffic lane to reduce congestion. These had to be intuitive – the project would have failed if we had relied on special driver training before the network could be used – and that included foreign drivers with poor English. The design of the simple, intuitive Operational Regime was one of the major innovations in the project and to most people seems the simplest – as is so often the case “well that’s obvious isn’t it” only works with hindsight.

The results

An extensive monitoring and reporting exercise was undertaken of the initial ATM projects with analysis and reports at 3, 6 and 12 months after opening then after 3 years.

• The variability in journey times has reduced by 27%, allowing, drivers – both private and commercial – to plan their journeys better.
• Safety - The Personal Injury Accident (PIA) rate fell by 50% and there have been no killed and seriously injured accidents during hard shoulder running. 
• Divers using managed section of the M42 are estimated to have reduced their carbon emissions by 10% through fuel savings.
• The new approach delivered 80% of the benefits of road widening at 20% of the cost.

From Pilot to “Norm”

The success of the early projects led to a new approach at the HA and it has now evolved into the world’s leading highway network operator.

As a result of the ATM Pilot, the Roads Programme has changed completely to one where Smart Motorways form the core of the investment and the strategy for operating the network.

The principals of safe operation with clear outcomes aligned with the analysis of the network performance data and customer feedback have all been used to evolve the initial ATM design through a Managed Motorway approach, which was like an ATM “lite” and to the current standard of Smart Motorway where rather than allowing traffic to use the hardshoulder at certain times, the hardshoulder has gone and a temporary hardshoulder can be created using information technology when required. A new operating paradigm has been created.

The future

The National Traffic Information Service now uses in-car real data to augment the data received from roadside cameras and data loops in the road, this provides a greater level of information including predictive information. As satnav become ubiquitous the system could also communicate directly to drivers during their journey. Does this mean that the overhead gantries will no longer be needed as drivers can be instructed through their satnav.

In a few years we will see the introduction of autonomous cars were the driver is no longer part of the control loop and the smart highway can communicate directly with the car.

So with hindsight, perhaps there is a lesson that we didn’t look far enough into the future.

Transfer to water and wastewater

So what lessons does the intelligent highways network have for the water and wastewater networks? What are the differences and similarities that may affect a transfer of knowledge?

Water and wastewater, even more than highways, are a true 24/7/365 service with any interruption to normal service regarded as a failure. However they are undervalued services with customers not willing to pay extra for an improvement in service.

Delivery of water and wastewater services relies on the whole system we cannot just manage the trunk network as many problems occur on the local networks.

The variability in demand is even greater than for highways. For wastewater systems the peak flows can be 40 times the average flow.

Also the industry is more fragmented with multiple clients and a disparate supply chain that makes it more difficult to drive forward a new way of doing things.

Both the highways and the water sectors have changed over recent years and they now have more similarities than they used to. 

Both now have an integrated view of the management and the operation of assets. Both now have a focus on outcomes for customers and the environment rather than on asset condition. Both now integrate capex and opex to look at whole life best value – although this is new for the water sector and it may not have overcome the traditional bias towards capital expenditure that has existed for many years.

In the UK we are confident in the water and wastewater equivalent of traffic lights – a single control. But they are not considered for all parts of the network. We have tried some examples of complex control systems –the equivalent of managed motorways but these have often been as a demonstration project and they have not had sufficient buy in to be fully accepted. What the UK water sector is not very good at is the medium scale of linked controls that offer much of the benefit of wide scale control but with less complexity.

There is a concern in some places, that investing in smart networks will allow us to defer “real” expenditure that we should be making and just leads to us sweating the assets. However with a proper approach based on delivering outcomes, whole life cost and risk analysis then sweating the assets can be seen as delivering best whole life value for customers and society.

We need a different mental picture of what it means to sweat the assets – perhaps like the vision for highways.

Learning from highways

We have recently delivered several projects for UK Water Industry Research to demonstrate in detail how to make the best use of smart technology for wastewater systems. We are now encouraging consideration of control systems for all wastewater system upgrades to investigate the improved value that they can deliver and show how they can be made to work safely and reliably.

The WSP “Future Ready” initiative provides a framework for thinking further into the future than the obvious foreseeable horizon so we have learned to think further ahead. We are already thinking about how to manage water and wastewater networks if individual houses are “smart” and interact with the network control systems.