The influence of unforeseen, and not just necessarily extreme, weather conditions have adversely impacted Costain's construction productivity causing them significant project delays and economic losses. Costain's smart motorway projects, like most infrastructure projects, are predominantly carried out outdoors and involve multiple weather-sensitive activities. However, different activities are often susceptible to different combinations of weather variables and/or intensities. This has made the analysis of interaction between weather and construction productivity quite challenging so far. Nowadays, the UK government is committed to investing over £300 billion on an upgraded infrastructure system by 2021. Late projects delivery may have a significant economic impact at the country level. This, as missing the timely exploitation of this new infrastructure during a period of heavy investments can harm the country's economic growth and the financial stability of multiple stakeholders, including the government. The aim of this project is to tackle the challenge of harnessing the weather seasonal average variation from a construction-relevant perspective. The objective is to develop a holistic and quantitative Operational Research scheduling tool that anticipates the likely occurrence of specific combinations of weather events that prevent the satisfactory execution of frequent construction operations. Not extreme weather events, just sequential phenomena and/or combined non-extreme weather events, which condition over 95% of most contractors' daily operations. Particularly, the tool will implement a recent Stochastic Operational Research (SOR) model proposed by the investigators, which will allow Costain to optimise the project and activities start dates, their order of execution, even alternate locations across the UK when possible. All these with the aim of shortening the ongoing and future project durations and/or reduce their costs. Additionally, this project will benefit other construction stakeholders such as public and private project owners. These will benefit from infrastructure projects put in service on time, with more efficient and weather-aware maintenance approaches, while significantly reducing the amount of the frequent weather-related claims. Regarding deliverables and outputs, the first stage of the project will consist of extending the investigators' SOR model to include smart motorway frequent construction activities. The second stage will involve developing a computer application that can create project schedules linking the former activities to specific (predefined and customisable) combinations of weather variables they are sensitive to. This computer application will implement a set of recent investigators' sine wave regression expressions linking historical weather events probability with the geographical coordinates and day of the year when construction activities can be performed. The third stage will involve the application submitting the initial project schedule to multiple artificially-generated years whose weather will collectively resemble the climatology of the region. In each of those years, the software will calculate the delays each project activity will suffer because of adverse weather. Finally, the computer application will estimate the overall shortest project total duration and the optimum activities order and start dates. Previous experiments with the current SOR model in building construction have shown that implementing this model at an early stage of a construction project can shorten the project duration by at least 10% (on average), reduce the indirect and overhead costs proportionally and ultimately improve productivity rates. Similar or higher figures are expected for future contractors' infrastructure projects. Expected dur.: 12 months. Total cost (at 80%FEC): £131,430.90 Keywords: Weather-wise, construction, scheduling, optimisation, Costain, smart motorways

This research project seeks to explore the interaction between innovation narratives at at industrial policy and organisational levels in the context of UK infrastructure sector. It is based on two fundamental research questions: 1) How do innovation narratives at industrial policy and firm levels interact in the context of UK infrastructure? and 2) What are the implications of this interaction for people and firms? The UK infrastructure sector faces a challenge in delivering targets of reducing costs of investment in infrastructure assets and improving their quality through innovation. The interaction between industry- and firm-levels innovation narratives have direct implications for the innovative capabilities of firms across the sector (Bartel and Garud, 2009; Denning, 2008). By improving innovative capabilities of the infrastructure firms, the project will help to solve a 'productivity puzzle' - a long-term slowdown in UK productivity growth. The current literature is largely silent on the ways in which narratives of innovation at industry and organisational levels interact. This is the gap in knowledge that the proposed research project will aim to fulfil. There is undoubtedly increasing interest amongst scholars of innovation in the importance of narratives, although there remains little consistency in terms of theoretical approach and scarce empirical investigation (Beckman and Marry, 2009). This 'narrative turn' in innovation studies focuses on understanding how the meaning of innovation is socially constructed through the use of narratives (Vaara et al., 2016). In this project, narratives are seen as unique discursive construction that embodies unity of purpose, a degree of coherence together with connotations of performative intent. Although rarely fixed or completely monolithic, narratives are nevertheless often repeated in organisations (Dailey and Browning, 2014). Narratives are often spoken, but there are other forms of performed narratives such as written and symbolic/visual. These are often reproduced on policies and reports, corporate websites, or in other externally-facing marketing material. Narratives hence may carry important messages at the level of the firm and at a sectoral level, and have important implications for developing strategies. Senior managers play an active role in the construction of such narratives, as they are responsible for formulating and disseminating an organisational vision and strategies (Sims, 2003; Sonenshein, 2010). Narratives of innovation also play an important role in constructing individual and collective identities (Vaara et al., 2016). For example, firms become recognised as innovative through the narratives they adopt. Innovation narratives will be examined based on the textual and visual data publicly available from innovation policies, government and industry innovation reports and strategies; and narrative interviews with established industry collaborators, including but not limited to Costain, Anglian Water, Galliford Try, Thames Tideway Tunnel, High Speed Two, as stated in the letters of support. Narrative interviews are likely to encourage interviewees to talk about innovations with the reference to organisational values and the vision of the industry to move forward (Soderberg, 2006). The three-year research programme will result in new scholarly knowledge on innovation narratives in UK infrastructure. The new investigator (PI) will be based at the Bartlett School of Construction and Project Management, University College London, working with Prof Andrew Davies as a mentor along with other leading researchers in the area of innovation and narrative research. ESRC New Investigator Grant will support the advancement of the investigator's and employed researcher's research and leadership skills. It will expand international collaboration network that would potentially lead to joint 4* publications and application for a larger ESRC grant proposal.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) involves capturing carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by power stations and other industrial processes and storing it in underground geological formation. The aim of this project is to gain an enhanced understanding of the impact of dynamic behaviour of carbon capture and storage using novel adsorbents. The proposed research involves development of advanced sorbents and numerical models to simulate the process of large scale CO2 capture and safe storage under variable power load (i.e. CO2 flow rate).

This partnership started 10 years ago, when Costain started a collaborative research programme with Highways England and the University of Cambridge that sponsored 27 PhD studentships and led to the establishment of three major efforts: (i) the Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction, which grew into the National Research Facility for Infrastructure Sensing to develop new methods for infrastructure data collection and analysis using sensors. Our joint work through this activity has collectively shaped national policy; (ii) the EPSRC Materials for Life project that led to a Programme Grant called Resilient Materials for Life, which led to the first UK demonstration of self-healing structures on the A465 road scheme; and (iii) the two EPSRC Centres for Doctoral Training in Future Infrastructure and the Built Environment, which led to Costain acquiring SSL, a data technology company that has accelerated our technology service transformation. All this steered the team to co-create an integrated and focused partnership programme through co-creation workshops, the outcome of which is the proposed Digital Roads partnership. Digital Roads is inherently a concept for how to disrupt the roads infrastructure sector in its entirety. We envision a future where every road is made of smart materials, has its own digital twin, and can measure and monitor its own performance. This will make roads considerably cheaper, more reliable, and safer. Our ambition is therefore to make roads (i) out of smart materials aware of their state and properties, (ii) documented in Digital Twins and monitored automatically, (iii) maintained proactively, and (iv) able to serve additional functionalities, therefore bringing automation efficiency to the road network. The Digital Roads concept rethinks roads as an integrated physical and digital product and associated lifecycle processes that continuously interact with each other to ensure efficiency and strong performance in terms of cost, time, quality, safety, sustainability, and resilience. To support this concept, the grant will therefore investigate how digital twins (for the digital product), smart materials (for the physical product), data science (for the digital lifecycle processes), and robotic monitoring (for the physical lifecycle processes) can work together to create a connected physical and digital product and associated processes with a strong focus on the flow of data between them to leverage their complementarity. For instance, starting from the smart materials: we will use graphene infused concrete coatings to enable self-sensing on both the road surface and the median barrier, that informs the road's digital twin through robotic monitoring, who in turn, along with other pre-existing data, informs the data-science enabled digital processes, and back. This is very timely and necessary, as, after failing to fully leverage technological advances repeatedly over the last 50 years, all the stars are aligned for the road infrastructure industry to leverage advances in information modelling, machine learning, automation and smart materials that now enable the team to have confidence in deliver the Digital Roads vision. Beyond the partnership, the Digital Roads team aims to develop outcomes by 2030 to a commercial stage and to follow the same development journey for other road assets such as bridges and tunnels - and eventually the entire strategic road network by 2040. This will allow Costain to create a leading digital service to deliver for Highways England who will be able to demonstrate greater value roads and enable other industries to do the same. This will ensure that roads become safer, benefiting us all; serviceable at lower cost reducing the burden on the tax payer; and maintained more efficiently and sustainably to benefit the stakeholders, society and the environment making the UK a global leader in Digital Roads technology.

The required global infrastructure investment from 2013-2030 is estimated to be £34 trillion. Thus there are significant social and economic ramifications associated with the utilisation and design of strategic infrastructure assets which are fit for purpose both now, and in the future. Nationally, the construction sector is vital and contributes around £90 billion annually to the UK economy. This EPSRC Established Career Fellowship will provide Dr Lees with the prestige and freedom to extend the impact of her research and develop a new field of research dedicated to the creation of tailored concrete infrastructure. The enhancement of the innate characteristics of reinforced concrete with a concurrent reduction in total cement content directly links to key Engineering global grand challenges for Sustainability and Resilience. Concrete is the most widely used construction material in the world, over 4 billion tonnes in 2013, and cement production is responsible for 5-7% of man-made CO2 emissions. 'Cradle to factory gate' emissions for CEM 1 are 913 kg CO2e for 1000 kg of cement. The sustainability credentials of the proposed research are to mitigate the scale of this environmental impact through the delivery of more durable construction, a reduction in the cement content in concrete products, and material efficiency. The 'innate' characteristics of our reinforced concrete infrastructure include an inherent resistance to a myriad of deterioration causes e.g. chemical attack, chloride ingress, and mechanical actions e.g. dead and live loads. To help achieve the desired resistance, minimum cement contents are specified for a required strength or durability. In conventional practice, the same concrete mix is used throughout a given structural element. A compelling new paradigm is to break from conventional thinking and reinterpret a reinforced concrete structure as a tailored continuum to meet a desired serviceability, strength and/or durability performance. Material with high cement content is used judiciously to boost the innate response of our reinforced concrete infrastructure by explicitly recognising, targeting and reacting to environmental and mechanical threats to structural performance. In this way, there is either no loss, or an enhancement, in structural and durability functions. The innate immunity against environmental actions is boosted for corrosion prevention whereas the adaptability in response to mechanical actions is enhanced through the novel design of the concrete continuum for a greater structural resilience. These deliverables present a unique opportunity for the PI, UK Academia and UK Industry, to establish a world leading capability in a nascent field while addressing Engineering Sustainability priorities for lifetime extension, reduced lifetime costs, energy minimisation and a reduction in over-engineering.