Interview: Buro Happold And Trl Partnership To Focus On Systemic Rethink Of Transport Infrastructure

Buro Happold and transport and mobility specialist TRL have formed an alliance to work with organisations including National Highways and Network Rail to transform transport infrastructure delivery.

The Buro Happold TRL Strategic Partnership’s stated vision is to link Buro Happold’s engineering, consultancy and advisory services with TRL’s transport research and development expertise. The aim of the alliance between the data-enabled organisations is to drive improvements in sustainability, resilience and operational efficiency across the nation's road and rail networks.

Key priorities will include addressing the impact of climate change on the UK’s ageing infrastructure and enabling socio-economic improvements; and a key point of difference will be the partnership's system-led approach.

TRL CEO Paul Campion and Buro Happold UK Development Director for Infrastructure Paula Gough spoke with NCE about their plans.

“One of the things that drew us together is that we felt there were some things that we could do jointly that we might do less effectively on our own,” Campion told NCE. “Buro Happold has experience in a whole set of sectors outside transport, while TRL has historical strengths across various parts of the transport ecosystem.”

“As a transport specialist, we've been around 90 years,” Campion said. “We started life as a government research laboratory and we've come from a heritage particularly focused on asset management, on safety, which has got a strong behavioural element.

“Buro Happold comes from much more of a contractor-practitioner-design perspective than we do. So there's very little overlap between us, which means when we both get in the room, we have these different perspectives, and there are sets of problems that we can attack together.”

A systems-led approach was likely to enable better long term outcomes than legacy thinking that focused on a project-by-project approach, Campion said.

Gough added that Buro Happold’s experience in rail- and road- adjacent sectors such as city planning would be key.

“Urban regeneration is an adjacent sector because it entails highways, local roads, street lighting and environmental impacts. When you're thinking about cities and how to make and build and develop good quality cities that are climate resilient and responsive to community needs, you are doing multi-criteria assessment, you are balancing lots of different needs of stakeholders and we're used to that complexity,” said Gough.

“We're talking to National Highways to say, instead of making isolated decisions on an asset- by-asset basis, why don't you give us the opportunity to bring our insights together to look at all your variables and all your assets with an umbrella view and enable you to take a more global decision on for example, ‘If I was to spend my money here, these are the outcomes’? You can then look at the patterns and model what your decisions will look like.’”

This approach would be supported by digital platforms such as the Buro Happold Object Model.

“The Buro Happold Object Model is an open source software which helps in looking at definition of the client’s problem. For example, National Highways is a common client between TRL and Buro Happold. It owns many types of assets; 60 or more different asset data and work banks where it holds the information on its assets.

“What it hasn’t got is the ability to look at these data from all these assets and firstly verify that data and understand it and secondly bring it together into one view: Here are my bridges; here’s my signage; here's my operational technology.

“The tool enables our clients to engage in multi-criteria decision making; do we prioritise environment or do we prioritise safety? Do we prioritise communities? Being able to adjust those levers and demonstrate the value of procurement and the client organisations incentivising innovation again, really putting value on research, development and innovation, is the key to coming up different ways of doing things and tackling productivity and efficiency.”

Digital technology was key to the partnership but collecting the right data and, critically, sharing it would be vital for industry to progress, Gough said.

“Where we've started to collaborate and we're bidding together, we have said that we will not only share data between the two of us, but also with our wider supply chain partners.”

“That is the level of maturity that the infrastructure sector needs to leverage collective knowledge to come up with new ideas to solve the climate crisis problems or the problem of communities.”

“At Buro Happold we are investing in the power of AI and particularly from a data integration perspective and use of a combined data between organisations to make better decisions to look at patterns.

“For example, there is a bank of carbon reduction interventions that we use; we work with Green Buildings Forum to look at that for buildings. We've come up with differentiated ideas on how to help one of our clients to target carbon reduction. That has been achieved through looking at lots of data that was enabled by AI to do it quickly, to then look at patterns that emerge – in other words intervention A is a lot more productive in carbon reduction that intervention B, so let's put our bank behind intervention A.”

She added: “We are advising government and other and arm’s-length organisations like National Highways on how to power technology and digital technologies to become more efficient. ‘Build it before you build it’ is a term we use to convent the importance of digital rehearsals to see the impact of decisions.”

Campion said: “Our aim at TRL is to help our clients to change the way they do things by taking advantage of these technologies. We’ve got a partnership with the Alan Turing Institute which is the government's research lab for AI, and we will absolutely be working to help our clients to help society take advantage of these technologies.”

Of the partnership he said: “The UK has to decarbonise; we've got an urgent requirement to deliver economic growth; there is a big problem with left-behind communities with many parts of the of the country struggling with the impact of cost of living.

“All these factors are going to require transport to deliver in ways it hasn't done before. Just hoping for it to magically be better isn't good enough. This has to be about - how do the country and the different parts of the transportation ecosystem deliver different results?"

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