Smart Infrastructure Boosts Asset Management

Smart cities are not just a business opportunity with a US$ 2 trillion market by 2025 (according to new forecasts from Frost & Sullivan), but also a great platform to provide data, information and ultimately insights to make informed decisions about the infrastructure that supports our cities, communities and economies. 

Every type of urban infrastructure, whether it is transport, water, waste, energy, buildings or bridges, is an integral part of the ‘fabric’ of a city in which our societies live and develop and form the basis of its livability. The health of a city is determined by the fluidity of its functioning, the places it provides and the connections it has with its inhabitants. 

To help us understand and interpret our cities and their requirements, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is already making waves. Technology including Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning is providing data; a crucial input for effective asset management.  

Here are examples of how technology is being used to provide data from assets. 

Access to real-time data allows us to understand infrastructure performance more directly and efficiently and also supports us to manage short- and long-term risks.   

1. Insights gained from infrastructure data can benefit asset owners and our cities and communities in many ways, including:
   Managing asset demand, i.e. managing speed on congested motorways, informing passengers of wait times.
2. Effective change planning, i.e. accurate modelling of the impact of infrastructure or demand changes.
3. Predictive maintenance, i.e. forecasting future renewals and the impacts of renewal activities.
4. Remote assets monitoring, i.e. measuring infrastructure performance in real time and triggering alarms when thresholds are exceeded.
5. Smart infrastructure is the foundation of smart cities. In smart cities, traditional infrastructure (bridges, slopes, buildings etc.), when equipped with sensing technology, can provide reliable and continuous data which, when transformed, provide valuable information for decision-making. These decisions are crucial to optimizing infrastructure on which our smart cities are based, enabling a more sustainable and improved quality of life for citizens. 
6. WSP is at the forefront of developing and enabling the use of technology to help asset owners and managers understand their assets and make decisions more efficiently. Our solutions range from supporting an infrastructure owner over the long-term with solutions that inform sound decision-making  to assessing the continued use of a building or other infrastructure after a natural disaster by performing a rapid assessment based on the real-time response of infrastructure.

Case Study

The Rakaia River Bridge is the longest bridge in New Zealand. It was built around 1939. In recent years, it had become a major impediment to the movement of goods across the South Island due to the load limits imposed. Conventional practice indicated that extensive and costly strengthening was required. 

To avoid these costs, the New Zealand Transport Agency, with the assistance of WSP’s Bridge asset management team, embarked on an ambitious programme to develop a cost-effective, real-time structural response monitoring systems. The system used a variety of technologies such as accelerometers, displacement transducers, vehicles weigh-in-motion testing, radar interferometry, wireless technology, and low demand solar powered systems to measure the bridge behaviour under normal loading conditions in real-time.

This data identified the actual capacity of the bridge and its likely failure mechanisms, allowing targeted intervention to be undertaken to avoid structural damage, and defer significant and costly strengthening.