UPGRADE · mUltiscale IoT equipPed lonG linear infRastructure resilience built and sustAinable DevelopmEnt

Long linear infrastructure (LLIs) earthworks (e.g. road & railway slopes, pipeline bedding, flood protection structures) are more vulnerable to cascading and escalating failures, due to their topographically designed spanning length and long operational lives. With increasingly frequent severe weather conditions caused by climate change, maintaining a high level of safety performance, especially for the aged LLIs, remains a constant challenge, leading to an ever-increasing amount of investment in maintenance. Current knowledge about how these assets deteriorate over time and how deterioration affects risk and performance is patchy. The conventional engineering-oriented approach alone became insufficient to provide a solution to the complex problem like this. As we accelerate into the 21st century, the latest advances in technology, through digitalisation by integrating new revolutionary data technologies of Internet-of-Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI), offer opportunities to UPGRADE our LLIs and achieve new heights in safety and performance. Highly-skilled researchers and practitioners, capable of dealing with such problems, are scarce and in high demand by both academia and industry. Therefore, formed with 11 world-leading research organisations and 6 companies across Europe, Asia and Oceania with expertise and facilities in Earth Observation, geomaterial testing, constitutive modelling, data mining, machine learning, uncertainty quantification, data-driven design and optic communication, UPGRADE aims to ensure comprehensive, robust and implementable solutions are obtained for LLIs resilience built and sustainable development. The network is carefully designed to enable research and innovation staff exchange across all aspects. UPGRADE secondees will enjoy a highly integrated, interdisciplinary and intersectoral staff exchange, sharing know-how and skills development environment through the planned secondments, networkwide events and local trainings.