Since September 2018, Ferrovial Agroman SA and Budimex SA have been participating in SAFEWAY – an international research and development project, financed by Horizon 2020 Programme. This great undertaking encompasses 14 consortium members from all over Europe.
The SAFEWAY project is closely connected with the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) which was planned to maintain infrastructural investments and provide service in key transport corridors in Europe.
In the process of implementation of projects concerning TEN-T, a great emphasis is placed on the evaluation of risks, improvement of safety and minimization of hazards connected with natural threats and human provoked disasters. The purpose of SAFEWAY is to design, validate and implement holistic methods, strategies, tools and technical interventions to significantly increase the resilience of inland transport infrastructure.
The developed solutions will be tested, both in view of their effectiveness and universality. Tests will extend to evaluating a possibility of foreseeing and early reaction to all natural disasters, such as: floods, droughts, earthquakes and disasters caused by people: accidents, acts of terrorism or fires.
SAFEWAY will carry out four real case studies distributed in five corridors of the TEN-T core network:
- The Atlantic Corridor, which is characterized by intense development of the railway and road infrastructure in the Iberian Peninsula. Research will be conducted here concerning weather phenomena and fires.
- The Mediterranean Corridor running through Spain. The southern-eastern part of Spain is characterized by a moderate seismic risk, high rainfall and extreme temperatures.
- The North Sea, Baltic Sea and Mediterranean Sea Corridors, where the analysis will extend, in particular, to the railway infrastructure between Manchester and London – the most frequently used railway line in the United Kingdom.
- The Port in Rotterdam and a section of motorway dedicated to autonomous cars.
In the process of project implementation, various sources of data will be tested, processed in real time, and ICT solutions, control tools based on teledetection and predictive modelling, as well as a possibility of their integration and use in traffic management systems.
The anticipated results of SAFEWAY will include improvement of mobility and reduction of costs of infrastructure maintenance, by at least 20%. The project is also aimed to significantly improve the safety of the transport infrastructure, develop complex tools, including an application designed to forecast and mitigate the consequences of extreme circumstances, in all types of catastrophes on the road.
Ferrovial Agroman & Budimex Involvement
The Railway and Transport Department, along with the R&D Department from Ferrovial Agroman, and in collaboration with Budimex R&D Department will develop the following tasks in the project:
- Leading the demonstrative pilots in Malaga and Murcia, to validate the methodologies and outcomes of the project.
- Providing adaptation needs of linear infrastructure facing extreme natural and man-made hazards, and dealing with new design basis for innovative construction, retrofitting solutions and repairing works.
- Leading Exploitation Plans and the Intellectual Property Rights strategy from the project.
Expectations
The main expected results of interest for Ferrovial Agroman and Budimex in this project are:
- Improvement of infrastructure reliability thanks to knowledge related to novel designs and technologies.
- Enhancing infrastructure client capacity due to a less disruptive maintenance of infrastructure and faster recovery after failures.
- Lowering long-term investment costs by using forecasting models which will address climate and man-made impacts.
- Reducing the life-time cost of infrastructure assets by using improved designs and materials that are self-adjusting, wear and weather resilient.
- Reducing operating costs and monitoring thanks to better maintenance strategies
International consortium
SAFEWAY consortium is composed of 14 partners who specialize in multi-disciplinary and multi-sectoral areas connected with the transport infrastructure in Europe:
- Ferrovial Agroman (Spain)/ Budimex (Poland)
- Network Rail Infrastructure (United Kingdom)
- Infraestruturas de Portugal (Portugal)
- Cambridge University (United Kingdom)
- Universidad De Vigo (Spain)
- Universidade Do Minho (Portugal)
- Stiftelsen Norges Geotekniske Institutt (Norway)
- Ingenieria Insitu (Spain)
- Demo Consultants (Netherlands)
- Planetek Italia (Italy)
- Infrastructure Management Consultants (Switzerland)
- Rutten Bernardus (Netherlands)
- Innovactory International (Netherlands)
- Transportokonomisk Institutt (Norway)
