UKCRIC - PLEXUS - Priming Laboratory EXperiments on infrastructure and Urban Systems

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The UK Collaboratorium for Research on Infrastructure and Cities (UKCRIC) is, with a (matched) capital investment of £138m from BEIS, creating world-class city observatory, modelling & simulation and physical laboratory facilities. The UKCRIC Laboratories will form the state-of-the-art, world class, national research infrastructure that UK academic researchers and infrastructure providers need if they are to deliver world leading infrastructure provision and performance. UKCRIC's overall mission is to move away from the traditional, somewhat siloed, academic and industry viewpoints, which all stakeholders now increasingly recognise is a major barrier to innovation and to the radical changes in infrastructure provision practice that are needed to tackle the huge scale of the UK and global infrastructure renewal challenge. This proposal from UKCRIC's Laboratories Strand aims to prepare for and use UKCRIC's laboratory facilities for the ultimate purpose of developing UKCRIC's research staff capacity & capability, and create a Common Vision, Strategic Research Agenda & Implementation Action Plan for the Laboratories Strand via three expansive yet interlinked critical technical challenges. It meets EPSRC's objectives of encouraging new collaborations; demonstrating cross institution-theme-facility working central to the UKCRIC vision; contributing to the benefits as set out in the UKCRIC Business Case; & delivering research aligning with the outcomes from UKCRIC's workshops.Three important and urgent technical challenges will contextualise the research:(1) intense physical interdependency of urban infrastructure systems, each of which relies on ground support; (2) harvesting energy from buried infrastructure systems; and, (3) accelerated deterioration of infrastructure materials due to extreme loading.The challenges are synergistic, having been identified by industry as high added-value problems offering quick-win outcomes. Exploration of these challenges will inform learning capture and be translated into the Vision, Research Agenda & Implementation Action Plan. PLEXUS will enable academics and industry stakeholders to co-produce and test the essential collaborative frameworks that will underpin the success of the overall UKCRIC enterprise. This integrated view will help drive progress towards the more integrated and holistic sector mindset that must underpin transformative thinking and practice in infrastructure provision.