CONTENTs

RECENT FLOODS IN EUROPE: A LESSON LEARNT FOR TRANSPORT AND CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE RESILIENCE

FORESEE PRESENTS AT THE UNITED NATIONS ECONOMIC COMMISSION FOR EUROPE

FORESEE'S LONG TERM SUSTAINABILITY PLAN AND EXPLOITATION OF KEY RESULTS

CASE STUDY 1: CARSOLI-TORANO (ITALY): A24 HIGHWAY

CASE STUDY 2: NAPLES TO BARI (ITALY) - A16 HIGHWAY

CASE STUDY 3: MONTABLIZ VIADUCT (SPAIN)

CASE STUDY 4: RAILWAY TRACK 6185 (OEBISFELDE-BERLIN SPANDAU)

CASE STUDY 5: M30 MADRID (SPAIN)

CASE STUDY 6: 25TH APRIL SUSPENDED BRIDGE - LISBON (PORTUGAL)

In July 2021, Germany and neighbouring countries Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands have suffered from disastrous flooding, affecting entire regions, wildlife and population. The floods claimed the lives of more than 200 people and damaged houses, properties and transport critical infrastructure, such as roads, railway lines, bridges and dams. The repercussions of these events will be felt throughout Europe in the following months.

The scientific community agrees on the part that climate change and global warming had in the floods and stresses out the likelihood of their re-occurrence in the future. Critical infrastructure in Europe and globally must be prepared to assess the climate change impact and adapt inland transportation to mitigate risk and increase overall resilience.

As dissemination of the results of the FORESEE project, a CEN Workshop Agreement was launched at the end of 2020, gathering experts from public administrations, industry, associations and universities from Europe and Africa. The European standardisation system makes the result of R+D projects available for hundreds of experts across the 34 national standards agencies, which constitutes a powerful peer-review. The document, “Guidelines for the assessment of resilience of transport infrastructure to potentially disruptive events”, was available for public consultation until August, 27th, and the results will be reviewed in the meeting scheduled for September, 14th. If consensus is achieved within the group (which has 28 registered experts), it will be published by CEN as CWA.

CASE STUDies

Worldwide and in Europe natural or man-made hazards are strongly impacting on the citizen’s safety and generate increasing economic loses year by year. The transport system is particularly sensitive and critical assets are extremely fragile in the face of unanticipated events. Infrastructure managers and operators have to ensure that transport assets and services function continually and safely against increasing extreme events which will require important investments to upgrade them in order to improve their resilience. FORESEE prioritised the most disruptive hazards impacting the transportation network, which are Extreme Weather Events (mainly flooding & heavy rainfalls, snow and wind), landslides, earthquakes and Man-made hazards (intentional and accidental), addressing their impact on the transport assets (bridges, tunnels, pavement, slopes, terminals), on the citizens & freight and cascade effects affecting the transport system (mainly road, rail, multimodal and transport hubs).

The overall objective of FORESEE is to provide cost effective and reliable tools to improve resilience of transport infrastructure, as the ability to reduce the magnitude and/or duration of disruptive events. FORESEE addresses through new innovative technologies, methodologies and resilient schemes the effectiveness of resilient measures to improve the ability to anticipate, absorb, adapt to, and/or rapidly recover from a potentially disruptive event.

In order to ensure the widest impact and market adoption of FORESEE’s innovations, 6 case studies have been selected due to their relevance in terms of :

• Importance of the infrastructure,
• Natural and man-made hazards coverage, potential for replication,
• Location and
• Commitment from the infrastructure owner and/or operator.

The following selected case studies reiterate the following pointers:

• Key infrastructure
• Key Threat (landslides/flooding etc.)
• What are these testing and how does that improve resilience?
• What tools are being used? (e.g. - Satellite mapping to prevent landslides)
• What innovative methodologies that are used?
• What are the potential exploitation plans/commercialisation plans for tools?

The A24 motorway is managed by Strada dei Parchi: it is a highway connecting Rome to the Adriatic Sea. The motorway is set up as a strategic and barycentric road system for the mobility on the east-west route of the country's central corridor and plays a vital role in support of the mobility of production activities, communications, commerce, tourism, and social and economic development of the country. The A24 motorway crosses an area rich and interesting from the naturalistic point of view. It should be noted, in that regard, the presence on the territory of six Natural Parks.

Starting from the GRA (Rome’s ring road) and ending in Teramo, the A24 is a suitable location to test FORESEE toolkit as it includes all the necessary sites to apply the tools developed in the project. Apart from several bridges and connections to busy roads around Rome, the highway includes two long tunnels under the Gran Sasso, with a length of over 10 km. The main threats all along the highway are earthquakes and heavy snow events. There are a lot of data (e.g. L’Aquila Earthquake in 2009) that will be used as a baseline to further measure the effectiveness of the FORESEE solutions.

On that respect, this case study will test several components of the FORESEE Toolkit, such as the Decision Support Module and the Resilience Scheme application, that will help the infrastructure manager in taking better and optimised decision, and to strategically evaluate also the interventions to be done on the infrastructure.

We are really looking forward to use, validate and test the FORESEE components in order to properly evaluate its effectiveness, interoperability with legacy systems for a further adoption in our company.

This viaduct saves the big valley formed by a river in Cantabria Spain. It has a length of 721 m distributed in 5 spans (11 + 155 + 175 + 155 + 126), maximum light 175.00 m, radius of curvature in plant 700 m. Continuous board, formed by a monocellular drawer of prestressed concrete of variable edge between 4.30 and 11.00 m supported on single pile. The maximum height of the pile is 128.60 m, the highest in Spain and among the 6 largest in Europe (year 2008). The board has been built by the voussoirs system concreted "in situ" by cantilevered forward.

The key climatic elements threatening this viaduct are wind, fog, snow and flooding. This case study is working towards detecting natural and artificial hazards. It aims to improve resilience through mitigating natural and artificial risks throughout the life cycle as well as focusing on solution resilience, design resilience and operation resilience. The tools used are risk mapping and governance module.

Some of the innovative methodologies being used include the following:

1. RISK MAPPING; LOGISTIC REGRESSION - The application for large scale rapid risk analysis developed in T2.2 follows and empirical approach as it is based on a series of past real extreme natural events occurred all over Europe in the last years. For assessing the risk of occurrence of the three most significant natural disasters -floods, landslides and earthquakes-, multiple linear regression and ordinal logistics regression models have been developed that made use of the catalogue of past real events as the response variable and a series of geo-referenced databases as factors or predictor variables.
2. GOVERNANCE MODULE; MULTICRITERIA ANALYSIS - Decision support system (DSS) is driven by ELECTRE (ELimination and Choice Expressing Reality) methodology.

The potential exploitation plans/commercialisation for tools include Application GIS Risk Mapping and Patent Governance Module.

The “Case Study number 5 - M30 Madrid” orbital motorway circles the central districts of Madrid, the capital city of Spain. It is the innermost ring road of the Spanish city, with a length of 32.5 km. It has, at least, three lanes in each direction, supplemented in some parts by two or three lane auxiliary roads. It connects to the main Spanish radial national roads that start in Madrid. It includes several tunnels under the river Manzanares.

The disruptions in the M-30 cause delays, traffic jams and have very relevant social-economic impact that will be studied in this case study, as it affects the daily commuting of an important percentage of the city. Some of the data gathered includes traffic and speed of vehicles, weather data and intelligent transport systems out of service.

The outcomes of the project will implement the advantages of real and accurate predictive maintenance strategies.

The case is quite unique in several aspects; on one hand it offers a big amount of heterogeneous data suitable for testing the hybrid data fusion approach; on the other hand it is the only FORESEE case study that analyses a direct anthropogenic hazard example, the “hacking tunnel systems hazard”, for which there are not many historical examples and, therefore, benefit from using hybrid data fusion from traffic simulations.

The “hacking hazard” or cyber attack is a relatively new anthropogenic hazard to be considered in transport infrastructure. The term describes a wide range of security hazards created by humans that can affect directly or indirectly to the infrastructure’s operational, economic and safety parameters. Whether they attack the transport modes, the transport network, the traffic flow control, revenue, management or communications systems, they can directly affect public safety and critical operations, as well as the infrastructure operation and organisation.

The following tools of the FORESEE project are being evaluated: Decision Support Module, Hybrid Data Fusion Framework, Traffic Module, Command Control Center and all tools associated to Work Package 7, that are related to operation, maintenance, emergency and contingency plans.

For example, the traffic module is being checked as it follows:

The resulting traffic model covers the South-West area of the M30 that has the tunnels under the river Manzanares, as well as the main nearby alternatives to the corridor. The model includes 1364 road sections with a total 224Km long network, of which 8km are bridges, 42km are tunnels and 174Km of different type of roads. The scenario proposed for the simulation includes a very busy day in June as it follows:

The results of these simulations will serve as validation and training for the algorithms developed as part of the Hybrid Data Fusion Framework. All these tools will serve to check if the value of the Key Resilience Indicators selected by using the tools developed as part of the working package number 1, increase and reach the expected Key Resilience Target. Some of these selected KRI are:

• Age of replacement of safe shut down systems
• Age of replacement of the warning systems
• Condition state of the infrastructure
• Condition state of protective structure and systems
• The possibility of using another means of transport demand
• Traffic
• Presence of a maintenance and emergency plan

In short, we hope that with the implementation of these tools the Key Resilience Indicators will increase and will give very useful information to the infrastructure manager to make the M30 more resilient against cyber attack events.