Engineering, design and planning specialists are increasingly required to rapidly adapt to multi-faceted challenges – from climate change impacts to rising costs and supply chain insecurity. Optimising the provision of solutions – often within large complex systems and against an environment characterised by uncertainty – is a focus for Arup UKIMEA managing director Tom Wilcock.
Managing director of Arup – UKIMEA Tom Wilcock
“When we think about resilience and the major challenges facing the UK or any society, whether that’s about adequate transport infrastructure or adapting to climate change, we really need approaches that are systems-based.
The need is for collaboration that can bring together expertise and insight across organisations, whether they’re public or private sector, to design, operate, maintain and plan systems together.
“It’s really about understanding the broadest context of a problem before diving in to solve it. There are loads of examples of places where you can arrive at a brilliant solution to the wrong problem.”
Systems in action
“I like to think about this in terms of scales, whether that’s time scales or physical scales,” he says. “Digital tools enable us to look at problems and analyse them and make decisions in a way that considers time frames and physical scales differently.”
One example is Arup’s work on The Department for Transport’s National Transport Analysis Platform – a scalable, cloud-based system for national transport modelling, which supports analysis of traffic, freight and policy scenarios.
“The idea is that policies can be tested at scale and, critically, in minutes. Until recently, that national scale impact assessment of a policy change could take you weeks to work through. Recent advances in computational power – along with analytical capability – mean that the aim of this project is to compress that down to a 20-minute period.
“You might change the speed limit in a model – if we take roads as an example – to understand the knock-on consequences for the whole transport network. Or you might think about a new rail line and then be able to model the interconnected impacts of that rail line on the broader transport network.”
Comparable developments are rolling out in the energy sector, where Arup is the delivery and technical partner for the National Electricity System Operator (Neso) on the Virtual Energy System (VirtualES) programme – designing the foundational framework to build a real-time, nationwide digital twin of an increasingly diverse energy landscape.
“If you wind back 20 or 30 years, the energy system was largely powered by discrete power stations that had a predictable power generation profile – and energy usage was also reasonably predictable. Today, the energy system needs to cope with a much broader range of generation types, from power stations to systems that generate energy when the wind blows or the sun shines.
“To make that work, we’ve been developing a series of connected digital twins for the energy sector. That enables different organisations to interact with one another and with the network to participate in a much more distributed model of energy generation and supply and demand.”
In the water and flood alleviation space, Wilcock refers to Arup’s use of digital tooling on the Shanghai Urban Drainage Masterplan – combining satellite remote sensing with artificial intelligence – as an early example of a scheme in which the same challenge was approached at a range of scales.
The masterplan adopted a sponge city approach blending traditional grey infrastructure (pipes, tunnels and pumps) with blue and green infrastructure – wetlands, permeable pavements and green roofs.
“The technology allows you to do the micro-interventions that you see on our streets or in the back garden to understand the impact that those sorts of changes have on the entire city-wide infrastructure system – so being able to move between city scale and back garden scale, enabling engineers, designers and planners to think about the whole system together in a way that wasn’t possible prior to widely available satellite data and machine learning or AI.”
Evolving with technology
Wilcock notes that the rapid evolution of technology is offering opportunities. Agent-based tech is increasingly being used in “modelling complex behaviour where you’ve got individuals who interact with a physical system, and you want to be able to generate different scenarios to understand their response as individuals and collectively to parameters,” Wilcock says.
“We started off originally doing that within the context of buildings, with crowd simulation through a piece of software developed by Arup called MassMotion. We then realised we could use it to help design things like transport interchanges.
“The critical thing there as designers and planners is to understand the way that systems respond to uncertainty. You can’t design out uncertainty, but what you can do is work through a range of scenarios so you gain confidence in the way a system will respond.”
Arup has also been developing “surrogate models” – AI models trained on physical simulations that enable the creation of predictive models, which can be deployed quickly at the early stages of design, he says.
One example relates to wind modelling to understand pedestrian comfort around the massing of buildings.
“You traditionally use computational fluid dynamics for that, but it takes a lot of time to run those analyses. So you would typically only do that once you’re quite developed in terms of your scheme. With the surrogate model, we’re able to bring forward an approximation of that much earlier in the design process.”
Wilcock observes that digital tools should simplify decisions for asset owners, operators and users, rather than adding friction. Given the raft of emerging technologies, high quality, well-organised data is “foundational”, he notes, while “getting governance right” is critical.
Here, he cites Neso’s VirtualES programme as an example. “This is not a big, singular platform. It’s an environment with governance and standards to enable different organisations to interact with one another.
“Some of the assets that are part of the network are owned by different organisations and play different roles. So what’s needed is a set of standards and a framework that bring that all together in a system.”
Contractual arrangements are evolving accordingly, he says. “We’re seeing a broad range of contracts in this space; everything from organisations that will stipulate that you mustn’t use AI in your work, through to others that might require that you do. So there’s certainly no singular approach across our client base for that.”
Investment horizon
For Wilcock, technology and systems thinking will play an important role in delivering infrastructure and planning solutions that accurately and cost-effectively meet pre-defined needs. And he believes this will be key to supporting long-term economic productivity and resilience.
“From our perspective, it’s about ensuring that all relevant stakeholders are engaged as early as possible, so we’re making sure we’re solving the right problem. And that’s certainly linked to the idea of creating the right environment for investment.
“We’re very clear-eyed on that – and there’s a role for government to play in joining those dots to ensure that we can we can produce holistic solutions. The work of organisations like Nista [the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority] is really valuable here because it has a cross-sectoral role.
“In terms of where the UK is at the moment, we do see positive signs that the thinking behind this is being taken seriously,” he says. “Fundamentally, this is about unlocking opportunity.”
