Smart management of infrastructure assets

In recent years there has been a step change increase in the volume and speed of infrastructure systems data generation. Coupled with increasing pressure to use this data to help improve individual asset and wider systems performance, this is creating a demand for improved processes and procedures to capture, store and use this data in more intelligent and effective ways.

CIRIA’s recent event gathered industry professionals to explore ‘smart management of infrastructure assets’ and discuss effective use of data in managing infrastructure assets. The event also looked at emerging good practice in the capture, management and analysis of construction and other related data and its effective use in managing assets.

Chaired by Kieran Tully, who recently joined CIRIA as our newest Associate Director, this event highlighted major organisations and their approaches to utilising data to support asset management.

Beatrice Filkin from Infrastructure UK’s Major Infrastructure Tracking Team provided an overview of cover how Infrastructure UK use data to assess the national infrastructure asset, and how this is used to set out our future investment and skills needs.

This was followed by a presentation from Rod Hulse, Head of Quality Assurance at Gatwick Airport, who discussed how the increasing volume of data and information informs decisions of asset operations and management, and some of the challenges and new developments which you see emerging.

Dr Chris Power, engineering geologist with Mott MacDonald, discussed the importance of good quality data as a basis for prioritisation and decision making and the importance of asset information systems with examples of data driven asset management strategy and policy.

Francine Bennett, CEO and cofounder of Mastodon C, Arup's big data specialist partners, provided an overview of the operational and IT challenges we are facing when considering ‘big data’, the challenges with big data analytics, and showed the opportunity for the use of data.

Discussion throughout the event considered developments in this area, highlighting the many emerging innovative technologies which are contributing to a step change in industry, from planning and construction and how we consider asset management. Techniques and tools to ‘care for’ and analyse this enormous amount of data to inform business planning will be paramount for effective asset management.

CIRIA’s next event in this series Infrastructure data technologies - from vision to reality will take place on 19 May and intends to showcase case studies of several current technologies being incorporated into infrastructure projects and looks ahead to what future trends will be.