Reflecting on our annual conference
Working together for resilient infrastructure – DAFNI Conference 2024
Over 150 in-person delegates came together for DAFNI’s day-long annual conference on 10th September 2024, to discuss the theme of ‘Working Together for Resilient Infrastructure’.
The conference included the sub-themes:
- Modelling for Resilient Infrastructure
- Challenges and Opportunities in Data Sharing
- The Impact of Digital Twins
DAFNI’s new Science Lead, Tom Kirkham, welcomed delegates to Aston University, Birmingham and introduced the conference. Formerly at Innovate UK, Tom has rejoined STFC and says, “I have joined the DAFNI programme as I have a research interest in how compute models and data can be developed and best / securely reused to support industry and public services. I am keen to use my skills and experience to support the current and future development of the DAFNI community. During my time at DAFNI, I hope to be able to support technical staff in this work and help the wider programme engage with its user base reaching into new domains.”
The Greater London Authority gave the first keynote, on ‘Data Sharing in London’, with speakers Martine Wauben, Head of Data for London, and Helen Huemer-Markides, Infrastructure Data & Innovation Lead. They discussed how it’s essential to move from outcomes to data and enablers – without missing out any steps along the way. Delegates were invited to contribute metadata to the new Data for London Platform or get involved with the user research side. The new platform will include a Data for London Library of important datasets – both open-source data and metadata of private datasets. To encourage data sharing in the infrastructure space for London across 33 London boroughs, they have developed the Infrastructure Mapping Application (IMA) toolbox to be a trusted conveyor of data at the heart of London’s infrastructure data sharing evolution.
Brian Matthews, DAFNI Programme Lead and Jens Jensen, DAFNI Team Lead and Data Security Architect introduced the DAFNI programme strategy and technical roadmap, and discussed use of computational modelling and data to strengthen resilient infrastructure & its effect on domains such as environmental and health. Brian explained how DAFNI supports the UKRI’s ‘Building a Secure and Resilient World’ key research themes through user projects in the complex area of infrastructure resilience across areas from energy to transport. Jens drilled down into the detail of workflows, how to share work with other DAFNI users to make the most of the collaborative aspects of DAFNI, the tiers of DAFNI user, the collection pages to showcase your assets, accessing and uploading external datasets, the system development plan, and DAFNI’s move to a new Kubernetes cluster.
Our industry panel featured a lively debate on the topic of resilience with representatives from government and commercial organisations. Ben Fitzsimons, Technical Director at Water Resources East, together with Holger Kessler, Senior Stakeholder Manager, Assets & Technology – Infrastructure UK & Ireland at AtkinsRéalis, and Oliver Tones, Head of Data Sharing and Technology at DSIT joined three other speakers, including Caro Ames, Data Science Strategy Leader at Arup who commented, “When building resilient Net Zero infrastructure, we need to think about an energy system but we must also consider a system of systems!” Martine Wauben, Head of Data for London at the GLA, added, “There’s a human determinant not just a technology determinant [to data sharing].” Yiu-Shing Pang, Open Data Manager at UK Power Networks, said, “We are a low-risk industry. It is our responsibility to make sure the lights stay on. There are real risks to revealing where your assets are.”
Dr Xilin Xia, Assistant Professor in Resilience Engineering, University of Birmingham, gave a project update on the STORMS project – Strategies and Tools for Resilience of Buried Infrastructure to Meteorological Shocks. They are developing a weather-related risk assessment framework to increase resilience to weather-related risks, including analysing soil structure data and damage calculations for buried pipes. DAFNI is being used for the workflows and visualisations. The STORMS project also models what may happen in the future and can be used to help map required adaptations for climate change and to increase resilience at network and national scale to inform national guidance.
Dr Peter McCallum, Research Associate, Institute for Energy Systems, University of Edinburgh presented on D-RES – Provision of Distributed Grid Resilience using EVs during extreme weather events. D-RES considers measures of climate risk and the issues of unmanaged EV charging especially during storms. The project is mapping business as usual, during and after extreme weather events. It examines the impact on EV charging, with a case study on Orkney – an ideal UK microcosm with high EV take up, which is also subject to extreme weather. They’re also ensuring the projects outputs can be readily used by other researchers.
Professor Richard Dawson, Professor of Earth System Engineering and Director of Research in the School of Engineering, Newcastle University spoke on FIRM: Flood Resilience Simulation on DAFNI. “DAFNI will make the FIRM model more accessible and widely applicable,” he said. FIRM can be used to explore magnitudes of events and impact of choices on the outcome of events, and how people respond to extreme weather events, to model how people are likely to be exposed to dangerous depths and speeds of water. The model includes risk to people and property and helps inform evacuation planning and where safe areas should be set up, as well as choke points and congestion points during evacuations – it’s modelled on an area in North Wales prone to flooding and with the additional challenge of many bungalows and caravans. The topography of the land and the topology of evacuation means people can get trapped and identifying areas most at risk was an important part of the project.
Dr Giuliano Punzo, Lecturer, University of Sheffield & Director of the Sheffield Urban Flows Observatory, spoke on ClimaTracks: Forecasting resilience of railway network under propagating uncertainty. Network Rail faces up to £100m of losses per year due to weather events. Giuliano presented the early results from the project, mapping the challenge of high uncertainty of weather events and their impact, and modelling uncertainty propagation. Data used in the model includes historical rail delays, assets like railway tracks and weather, from temperature to relative humidity. Simulations of rerouting and unmet demand will help network operators to better plan.
Dr Richard Milton, Senior Researcher, Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL introduced SCQUAIR: Simulating the Resilience of Transport Infrastructures Using QUANT. Richard developed the current iteration of the QUANT spatial interaction model with an emphasis on AI for building new transport infrastructure scenarios for carbon Net Zero. The model simulates the pattern of land use and transport – users can quickly run optimisation models that show how future plans for location of land uses and transport can be significantly improved.
Dr Vassilis Glenis, Senior Lecturer in Hydroinformatics, School of Engineering, Newcastle University spoke about SOFRAMODE: Sewer Overflow Flood Risk Analysis MOdel DAFNI Enabled. The project is developing a state-of-the-art platform on DAFNI to understand and simulate urban drainage-related to surface water flooding and high-profile storm overflow events, for any UK town or city. Scenarios will include current and future rainfall and allow researchers and industry to design and test mitigation strategies for storm overflow spills and surface water flooding.
Dr Hannah Bloomfield, NUAcT Fellow in climate resilient energy systems, Newcastle University showcased BRINES: Building Risk-Informed redundancy for Net-zero Energy Systems. BRINES explores the use of weather and climate data to highlight future resilience challenges to the UK power network in view of maintaining supply and demand, and to avoid damage to assets from extreme weather. They will develop a risk assessment tool of the national energy system on DAFNI.
Dr Anna Murgatroyd, Lecturer in Hydrology, School of Engineering, Newcastle University introduced the water resources simulation system, Pywr-WREW: Water Resources model for England and Wales built in Python. It will be hosted on the DAFNI platform to allow the team to collaborate more easily with partners including the Environment Agency and water industry stakeholders, more easily conduct model runs and explore results together. DAFNI will also significantly improve the efficiency of the model and the analysis.
Thanks to our afternoon chair – Professor Theo Tryfonas, School of Civil, Aerospace and Design Engineering at the University of Bristol, and member of DAFNI’s Strategy Board.
In our afternoon keynote, Professor Asaad Faramarzi, Professor of Geotechnical Engineering, University of Birmingham, presented on University of Birmingham’s Digital Twin. Asaad described the start of the DT work, from the partnership with Siemens, to external consultancy involvement and the Smart Campus project. The campus has over 30k occupancy sensors, 10k environmental sensors, 1000s of water and energy meters and more, such as space and building models, energy and water consumption, timetabling etc. An early version of the conceptual architecture has already been developed, bringing together the data, plus WiFi data into a dashboard to visualise the data into as close to real-time as possible. The DT aim is to reduce energy and costs, as well as support sustainability, improve heating & cooling, improve use of space and a host of other benefits. The project could potentially be expanded to the city as part of a smart city initiative. “Datasets when connected become greater than the sum of their parts!” he noted.
Dr Ana Mijic, Professor of Water Systems Integration and Director of the Centre for Systems Engineering and Innovation, Imperial College London, showcased RIWS: Resilience scenarios for integrated water systems. The project will develop scenarios that can provide evidence for water companies, planning authorities and environmental regulators on the feasibility of water systems adaptive planning when assessed by resilience metrics.
Professor Konstantinos (Kostas) Nikolopoulos, Professor in Business Information Systems & Analytics, Durham University introduced ForNet: DAFNI FORecasting Services for Energy NETworks. This addresses a critical gap in current energy demand forecasting models – the lack of consideration for human behaviour and cognitive biases. The methodologies, data and findings will be shared on the DAFNI platform to encourage collaboration and innovation in energy forecasting and policy development.
Dr Raghav Pant, Senior Research Associate, University of Oxford, presented on NIRD: Building systemic resilience of interdependent infrastructure networks at the national scale. NIRD will deliver an open-source modelling framework on the DAFNI platform for stress testing interdependent network resilience against flood and storm events. It will include a national-scale database of interdependent electricity, transport, water supply and telecoms networks connected to buildings and population concentrations in the UK.
Saskia Salwey, Research Associate, School of Civil, Aerospace and Design Engineering (CADE) – University of Bristol introduced USARIS: Uncertainty Quantification and Sensitivity Analysis for resilient infrastructure systems and underscored its importance in confidence building and stress testing of models. USARIS will set the foundations for integrating uncertainty quantification and sensitivity analysis functionality into the DAFNI platform.
Dr Qiuchen Lu, Associate Professor at Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction, UCL spoke on IMPACT: IMproving flood-disruPted road networks resilience with dynAmic people-Centric digital Twins. It aims to improve the resilience of road networks in fast-changing floods. She noted that the frequency of flooding has doubled since 2000, making this work ever more critical.
Dr Fabian Steinmann, Lecturer in Organizational Resilience and Change & Deputy Aviation Safety & Compliance Manager, Cranfield University and Cranfield School of Management, introduced MARS: Flight Diversion Modelling for the UK Aviation System. Drone disruption, IT outages & other issues make this work critical! He noted that there has been a huge increase in the volume of civil aviation in the UK which means increased utilisation of the runways and stands but a very finely balanced system.
Find out more about the conference speakers and view the presentations at: