Space Weather disruption of the near-Earth space- and ground-based systems is now accepted as having significant socio-economic impact , and is included in the UK National Risk Register for Civil Emergencies as a medium-high likelihood and medium impact civil emergency. Specifically, the UK National Risk Register identifies that "(c)urrent understanding is that a severe space weather event could have impacts upon a range of technologies and infrastructure, including power networks, satellite services, transport and digital control components" and that any industry relying on satellite services, that "(s)evere space weather can interrupt satellite services including Global Navigation Satellite Systems, communications, and Earth observation and imaging systems by damaging the space-based hardware, distorting the satellite signal or increasing the errors in ground-based receivers." The potential impacts of space weather on technological infrastructures, including power grids, satellite and ground communications and navigation systems, have generated world-wide interest at government levels in developing both forecasting and mitigation techniques and strategies. Indeed, the UK government is now seeking to establish a centre for space weather forecasting within the Met Office, who represent the state-of-the-art in forecasting terrestrial weather and can apply their 150 year heritage in forecasting to the field of space weather. The effects of extreme space weather can only be estimated since we do not know it's full extent. However, the potential total cost of an extreme Space Weather event has been estimated as around $2 Trillion in year 1 in the U.S. alone, with a 4-10 year recovery period . Quantifying the effects of Space Weather in all its forms is therefore of paramount importance. Less work has been undertaken in wider infrastructure sectors i.e. beyond those that coincide with technological infrastructures discussed above such as electricity distribution, communications and aviation. However, other infrastructure sectors exhibit important vulnerabilities to space weather, both being dependent on these technologies (e.g. GNSS, radio communication) through a disturbed ionosphere but also through sector-specific vulnerabilities. For example, Atkins has recently undertaken a study in relation to rail infrastructure, which has specific communication technologies and signal networks that are vulnerable to space weather. Therefore there is a need to consider sector vulnerability in more detail and this is particularly important for critical national infrastructure. Whilst much of this infrastructure has been examined, water is an area which merits increased attention. The water sector has extensive metal pipeline networks and is increasingly dependent on remote information collection and real-time control. The last two years of drought and extensive inland and coastal flooding has demonstrated the importance of effectively managing water. Moreover, the water sector uses UHF radio communication as an integral part of their operations and infrastructure. Since space weather is able to influence the propagation of signals through the modification and disturbing of the Earth's ionosphere, this represents an indirect way by which space weather can adversely influence the water sector operations and infrastructure. Atkins is the main stakeholder for this work, and Atkins is currently liaising with major water company clients on this issue. The wider stakeholder sphere will include the Environment Agency (as an asset manager and regulator), Ofwat, the Drinking Water Inspectorate, all water companies and water company supplies including consultants and the asset supply chain.

In this project, we will seamlessly combine two disciplines that have been historically received continuous government and industrial funding: physics-based modelling, which is generalisable and robust but may require tremendous computational cost, and machine learning, which is adaptive and fast to be evaluated but not easily generalisable and robust. The intersection of the two spawns scientific machine learning, which maximises the strengths and minimises the weaknesses of the two approaches. The data will be provided by high-fidelity simulations and experiments, from the UK state-of-the-art facilities and software. The efficiency of the machine learning training will be maximised for the algorithms to require minimal energy (thereby, producing minimal emissions by minimising electricity consumption). This project builds upon large UK and EU funded expertise in scientific machine learning and simulation, which will be generalised to fast, real-time decision making. The most significant bottleneck of most scientific machine learning is that they need time to be re-trained offline when new data becomes available. We will transform offline paradigms into real-time approaches for the models to re-adapt and provide accurate estimates on the fly. This project will culminate into the delivery of practical digital twins (defined as digital counterparts of real world physical systems or processes that can be used for simulation, prediction of behaviour to inputs, monitoring, maintenance, planning and optimisation) to solve currently intractable problems in wind energy, hydrogen, and road transportation. This project will transfer the technical achievements and real-time digital twin to policy-making.

Design in the UK construction sector is held in high regard internationally and produces 3.8 billion of export income per annum (Business and Enterprise Committee, 2008). In construction, design is undertaken as a collaborative activity by necessity, due to the division of labour and expertise between organisations (Bresnen et al., 2005). A consequence of the structure of the sector is that design activity involves the coordination of complex information exchanges in multi-disciplinary design teams. Coordination and communication challenges underlie difficulties in the integration of work activities of design teams. Communication is central to design collaboration and the coordination of design inputs, yet the communicative practices that coordinate design activities remain under-researched.Design team meetings are the locus for activities that are difficult to replicate in technologically-mediated environments (Visser, 2007). Indeed, it is the nuanced, micro-interactional communicative practices that are difficult to replicate but are significant for some shared understanding of a design situation that will be studied through this research. Face-to-face design interactions involve discursive moves where changes to the design are made verbally. In conversation designers with different knowledge backgrounds will negotiate design problems and verbally test alternate design solutions. It is these interactional, self-organising practices that coordinate real-time design activity that will be examined. The coordination of design activities will be investigated as this happens in the collaborative practices and communicative actions of cross-functional teams in design meeting settings. The face-to-face interactions of designers will be analysed from a language-use perspective, where the actions and practices that accomplish design coordination (or misunderstanding, ambiguity and uncertainty) will be investigated. From a conversation analytic-informed perspective patterns of interaction, spoken actions and particles in speech that mark shifts in understanding in the process of design will be analysed to locate interactional cues and communicative practices of design coordination. An intention is to link an understanding of structures and patterns in conversation with the way that engineering and construction management research communities understand design processes.

Delivery of net-zero carbon buildings is a critical and urgent component of UK legal obligation to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050 (BEIS, 2019a). The construction sector represents 10% of UK carbon emissions and directly influences 47% of all national emissions (NFB, 2019). While there has been significant technical progress, the UK building stock remains one of the most energy inefficient in Europe and the Government is not on-track to meeting its decarbonisation goals (BEIS, 2019). Most research into this 'performance gap' focuses on either technical problems and solutions (De Wilde, 2014) or on the promise of new integrator roles (Parag and Janda, 2014), with little discussion of the professional and organisational issues that challenge the delivery of net zero carbon buildings. The current organisational structure of projects has direct implications for the delivery of low and net-zero-carbon buildings. Construction projects are temporary organisations, involving multiple disciplines, multiple firms and multiple phases - each with its own teams and extensive sub-contracting (Winch, 1998). Organisational boundaries shape who participates in the specification of design problems and solutions and their transmission across project teams and phases. They also establish who is accountable for particular targets and who is not. When faced with a new task, professionals often sub-contract work out to a team of specialists with no awareness or responsibility for the design as a whole. The result is that solutions developed at one moment in time are not fully understood, as they are passed from one phase to another and carbon targets often fall off the agenda. The proposed research explores these effects by examining the initial development and ongoing modification of carbon reduction design solutions in six cases of new and retrofit commercial buildings. Commercial buildings tend to be bespoke, making the formulation and communication of solutions across organisational boundaries all the more critical. The research will be developed in dialogue with industry partners involved in these six cases. Special attention will be paid to the way in which design solutions are embedded in visual representations and physical artifacts, which are subsequently re-interpreted and modified. Findings resulting from this novel approach promise to contribute targeted guidance for the development of net-zero carbon buildings, the organisational and professional capability development of firms, professional training and educational curriculum. Together researchers and upwards of 30 industry partners, involved in six projects, will explore the effect of organisational boundaries on the delivery of low and net zero carbon buildings, revise firm-level protocols and develop capacity. In addition, the project will contribute to policy and professional guidance for net-zero carbon building, to teaching case studies for use in HE and CPD training and to a climate change and de-carbonisation educational management framework for built environment curricula, currently under development by the Climate Curriculum Project. By focusing on teams of sustainable minded professionals with a history of working together and professed commitments to carbon reduction, the research also provides an opportunity to capture, further develop and diffuse good practice.

The United Kingdom has rapidly ageing civil infrastructure. The ability to re-use deep foundation systems and construct new ones more efficiently will pave the way for considerable savings in financial and carbon resources. Geotechnical engineers frequently rely on past records and experience to design foundations. Foundation performance in the stiff deposits in the UK is difficult to estimate and is often reliant on preliminary pile tests to failure being available. If these tests are not available then very conservative design assumptions are used. This research project will provide the UK geotechnical community with an openly accessible database of pile load tests in UK soil deposits. Much of the data for the database will be sourced from the literature and consultants' records. Using the database, different models that can be used to predict pile settlement response will be compared statistically and re-calibrated. Estimates of 'reserve capacity' in UK foundation systems will also be made to search for insights into the potential for foundation re-use in future construction projects. The results of the analysis can also be used to derive improved partial factors for pile design. These can be used in new and updated codes of practice and design guides. A user friendly web-portal will be developed so that designers and researchers can rapidly access the underlying datasets in the database. This will allow others to calibrate their own models for pile behaviour.