Adrian Hickford – University of Southampton

Adrian is a researcher in the Transportation Research Group at the University of Southampton (www.southampton.ac.uk), whose early career focused on road safety research and accident modelling, but who soon diversified into freight studies, and the monitoring and evaluation of interventions to promote road safety and active and sustainable travel. Recent work has been based around developing cross-sectoral strategies to manage change for the future demand of integrated infrastructure systems as part of the Infrastructure Transitions Research Consortium (ITRC – www.itrc.org.uk). The consortium developed the world’s first national infrastructure system-of-systems model, NISMOD) and Adrian was a co-author of the first ITRC book “The Future of National Infrastructure: A System-of-Systems Approach.” During the second phase of ITRC (MISTRAL) he was lead author on the report into the multi-sectoral Oxford-Cambridge Arc case study, and also has assessed a range of pathways to decarbonise transport in the next 30 years in England’s Economic Heartland (EEH – www.englandseconomicheartland.com), using outputs from the NISMOD transport model.

As the DAFNI Champion for the University of Southampton, Adrian will identify potential future users of DAFNI, and hold discussions and presentations with particular groups and individuals to promote the facility within the Engineering department and further afield, including a focus on users of the UKCRIC-funded National Infrastructure Lab and their DAFNI-funded computing facilities, plus the forthcoming DAFNI-funded Virtual Room, targeting current and future research projects.

A second part of this advocacy role will be to undertake a survey of the transport research community across the UK via the Universities’ Transport Study Group (UTSG – www.utsg.net), to try to determine the key requirements from a facility such as DAFNI, and how might it be appropriate for transport research generally.

Adrian can offer feedback to the DAFNI team, effectively as a new user, since he will be working concurrently on an EPSRC-funded Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) study to build and strengthen relationships with transport bodies both regionally and nationally. The transport model has had relatively limited exposure to the wider research and policymaking communities, so the IAA study will build on the previous work with the Ox-Cam Arc and the EEH, and apply the transport model in different scales, for other national, regional and local situations, applying different strategy-scenario combinations, hopefully resulting in a greater exposure to national and local governmental bodies and policymakers. Interactions with these stakeholders will also be used to promote DAFNI facilities, and identify any other potential future use cases.