Safeway Project

SAFEWAY leads to significantly improved resilience of transport infrastructures by developing a holistic toolset with transversal application to anticipate and mitigate effects of various extreme events. These events include both natural hazards (heat and cold waves, river and coastal floods, landslides droughts, wildfires or windstorms where climate change also affects the severity and frequency) as well as man-made events (predominantly terrorism, vandalism, accidents, negligence). These tools will be deployed for critical hazards that are affecting the main TEN-T corridors in Europe that is largely covered by SAFEWAY consortium presence and knowledge. Particularly, for natural hazards, SAFEWAY addresses: wildfires in Portugal; floods, which currently account for half of climate hazard across Europe; land displacements in the UK, Spain, the Netherlands and Portugal; and seismic-related events in the Iberian Peninsula. Resilience to man-made hazards will be achieved by mitigating their impacts thanks to real-time mobility advice (e.g. TomTom real-time traffic management). Both for natural as well as man-made hazards, SAFEWAY employs innovative socio-technical components of psychology and risk tolerance at local, regional and European communities.

SAFEWAY’s main aim is to design, validate and implement holistic methods, strategies, tools and technical interventions to significantly increase the resilience of inland transport infrastructure by reducing risk vulnerability and strengthening network systems to extreme events. SAFEWAY’s objectives will address and strengthen the four criteria for a resilient infrastructure: robustness, resourcefulness, rapid recovery and redundancy.

Within these dimensions, SAFEWAY will:

(a) implement novel technologies that provide a new multiscale monitoring approach by combining existing remote-sensing technologies to anticipate the impact of extreme events.

(b) use crowdsourcing and exploit social media infrastructure to monitor human response during and immediately after a natural or man-made extreme event;

(c) develop the framework for decision-making considering the above-mentioned factors for both single mode transportation (road and railway) as well as in a multimodal context; this framework will balance stakeholder’s demands and optimise priorities (short-term and long-term) in assets’ treatment, on the basis of predictive models that account for climate change projections, and prognosis regarding population, structural and traffic conditions.

(d) integrate this multidisciplinary approach through a modular cloud-based ICT platform that

provides optimal interfacing among the different components of SAFEWAY’s resilience solution

SAFEWAY cloud-based ICT Platform is designed to fully support robust decision-making for Infrastructure Management by integrating:

(i) metrics of infrastructural physical condition and its environment that may anticipate the infrastructure response before the occurrence of external hazards;

(ii) effective and dynamic predictive models that consider several actions and their impacts;

(iii) Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) based on mitigation measures and dynamic traffic restoration solutions; and

(iv) measures ensuring the safety of users addressing physical, psychological and behavioural dimensions.

CONSORTIUM