The third MTU workshop took place at Leeds on the 17th of April 2007. Further details can be found here.

Every year, in excess of four million holes are dug in the nation's roads to repair leaks, provide connecting services to new premises and to lay new cables and pipes. Although recently installed assets may have been well mapped, location data on older services can be very poor, in some cases even non existent (except perhaps knowing the location of the terminating points). Some of the holes are unnecessary (dug in the wrong place owing to insufficient or wrong data), some cause third party damage to other underground services (or even first party damage!). More importantly, there are also considerable indirect costs owing to disruption on the roads caused by works, waste, and pollution.

Following a Sandpit in the EPSRC Ideas Factory programme, Leeds has received EPSRC funding to investigate the construction of a unified database of all the location data from the various various utilities. Constructing such a unified database will be a challenge owing to the current state of the records, which are frequently inaccurate, incomplete and sometimes not available in digital form.

Other projects funded by the same EPSRC initiative will investigate improved sensing technology, cm accurate positioning, and techniques for ensuring that assets buried in the future can be found more easily. The projects are linked by a network with industrial participation. Further details can be found here.

A further grant, Visualising integrated information on buried assets to reduce streetworks (VISTA), is funded under the DTI Technology Programme, and provides some £630k of funding at Leeds, £268k at Nottingham University to build on the initial EPSRC funding, in collaboration with 19 utility  and other partners in the sector.

 

                                                 

A copy of the UKWIR Director, Mike Farrimond's presentation initial to the Sandpit can be found here.

Leeds personnel:

·         Dr Anthony Beck (research fellow)

·         Dr Brandon Bennett (investigator)

·        Dr Nadia Boukhelifa (research fellow)

·         Prof. Tony Cohn (principal investigator)

·         Dr David Duke (investigator)

·         Dr Gaihua Fu (research fellow)

·        Pete Harper (senior research officer)

·         Dr John Stell (investigator)

Past project personnel:

·         Simon Hickinbotham (Research Fellow)

Prof. A.G. Cohn
School of Computing
University of Leeds
Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK
tel: +44 (0) 113 343 5482
fax: +44 (0) 113 343 5468
Email: a.g.cohn@leeds.ac.uk