Transcript Document

Infrastructure Transitions
Research Consortium (ITRC)
Centre for Earth Systems
Engineering Research
David Alderson & Stuart Barr
What is the aim of ITRC?
How are GeoInformatics@Newcastle involved?
To develop and demonstrate a new generation of simulation
models and tools to inform the analysis, planning and design
of national infrastructure.
GeoInformatics at Newcastle are involved in three work streams of the ITRC
project; the enabling tools and database being developed at Newcastle as part
of work stream 4 are used to facilitate research across other work streams,
whilst helping to
integrate modelling undertaken
in work stream 1. The analysis
of interdependencies between
national infrastructure networks
is conducted in work stream 2,
and uses custom databases
and code developed at
Newcastle.
What are the challenges faced by
ITRC?
• Analysing the long term state of NI systems.
• Quantifying and understanding uncertainties e.g.
demand, economic conditions, costs, performance.
in
• The complexity of multiple governance arrangements and
projects.
• The capacity of UK industry to compete in globalised
markets for infrastructure services.
Work Stream 1: Balancing
infrastructure capacity and
demand under uncertainty
Work stream 1 is developing a generic
modeling framework for the analysis of
capacity and demand, under uncertainty, of 5
key national infrastructure networks including
energy, transport, water, waste water and
solid waste.
As part of this framework an open source,
web-based data upload facility has be
developed to allow economic and population
projections to be saved to the ITRC database.
The economic and population projections,
developed by Cambridge Econometrics and
Leeds University respectively, are used as
inputs to each of the capacity and demand
assessment modules (CDAMs) for each
national infrastructure network. Furthermore,
a data query tool has been developed to allow
federated users to generate commaseparated files (.csv), graphs, charts and
maps of the different variables contained
within the economic and demographic
projections.
Population
(Leeds)
Figure.1 – ITRC work stream
organisation
Work Stream 2:
Understanding the future
risks of infrastructure
failure
Work stream 2 is developing interdependent
network models of the 5 key infrastructure
sectors and modelling the impacts and risk of
failure.
A custom database schema has been
developed to manage, store and represent
infrastructure
networks,
and
their
interdependencies (Figure 3). Each network
has an edges, edge_geometry, and nodes
table to store the edges and nodes of a
particular network. An interdependency edge
table stores the physical edges that exist
between two different networks.
Economics
(Cambridge)
Upload
Open source web framework
Storage
ITRC
Economics
ITRC
Population
Query
Query
Figure.2 – Open source web framework
for population and economic projections
Figure.3 – Entity-relationship model of
a generalised representation of the network
Interdependency schema.
Work Stream 4: Enabling
Tools
Work stream 4 is focused on the design,
development, delivery and management of a
national-scale infrastructure asset database
along with the development of software tools
that allow researchers and decision makers to
interact with the outputs generated from the
other work streams.
The ITRC database has been developed
using the open source relational database
software PostgreSQL, coupled with the
spatial extension PostGIS. The data is
organised into multiple database instances,
with each storing data relevant to a particular
sector e.g. energy, transport, water, waste
water and solid waste. The data has been
collected from a wide range of public,
academic and private data sources supplied
by ITRC project partners. In addition, data
generated as part of the CDAMs is also
stored within the ITRC database for archiving
and future analysis purposes.
Furthermore, databases have been created to
store climate-related hazard data, and also
the population and economic projections used
throughout work stream 1 (see Figure.2).
Figure.5 illustrates an example of the National
Grid Gas Transmission Network and the
National
Grid
Electricity
Transmission
Network stored within the ITRC database.
This data is visualised via the use of the open
source tool Quantum GIS.
Figure.4 shows the interdependency edges
between water pumping stations (blue) and
electricity sub stations (yellow) resulting from
using the network interdependency schema
and visualised using Quantum GIS.
Figure.4 – An example of an interdependency
between water pumping stations and
electricity sub stations.
Figure.5 – National Grid Gas Transmission
and National Grid Electricity Transmission
networks stored within the ITRC database.
In collaboration with:
For further information on the ITRC project please contact:
Mr David Alderson (Researcher on Work stream 1, 2 and 4): [email protected]
Dr Stuart Barr (Lead on Work stream 4, ITRC Project Co-Investigator): [email protected]
Mr Benjamin Kidd (ITRC Project Manager, Oxford University): [email protected]
http://www.itrc.org.uk – ITRC website
http://twitter.com/#!/ukitrc/ – Twitter