Project Summary

This project looks to implement the Virtual Operations Support (VOS) approach to enhance the capacity of highway authorities in managing extreme events and gaining situational awareness. Through a five-step information management process, the project aims to consolidate various data sources gathered in councils’ call centers and highway operations rooms. The resulting technical rapid impact assessment will serve as a crucial information baseline to guide stabilisation and recovery efforts.

Project Achievements

The project focused on the creation of outputs that can directly enhance highway operations managers’ ability to manage extreme events and has been successful in achieving this. The main achievements have been the development and illustration of a structured process, checklist and dashboard, which can guide and supports managers’ decision making, even as they experience “their worst day”. Although there were issues with the project’s IT element, this was embraced as a key lesson and used as an opportunity for goal realignment, the resulting dashboard is more functional as a result. Collaboration through workshops and focus groups with other authorities has presented opportunities for a substantive cross-fertilisation of good practice to be integrated in project outputs.

Conclusions

The project has successfully created outputs, which if adopted as new sector doctrine, are now available to directly inform and support highway operations managers faced with managing emergencies as part of a coordinated multi-agency response. In effect, this work has created new tools and drivers to enhance the development of important new sector resilience competencies. These outputs, if broadly accepted and engaged with, offer the potential for the sector to enhance its status as an empowered emergency responder and as the recognised lead in the management of the nation’s critical lifeline highway infrastructure.

Next Steps

This project has never been about the commercialisation of a product. Rather, it has always been focused on developing a greater resilience culture within the highway sector through the creation of outputs that can be used to directly strengthen and support practitioner competencies in preparing fo r, responding to, and recovering from major incidents. Next steps will start by embedding the newly defined processes within the operational practice of East Riding Coun cil and the wider highways community through training and exercising. One way to increase the outputs relevance could be to translate them into complementary checklists for use by other members of the team (e.g., strategic lead, operational team leader). Iterative work to develop the all-hazards dashboard will continue, to ensure the integration of any new and useful technological capabilities (e.g., bridge telemetry). Further engagement with like minds in Cumbria and Dumfries & Galloway offers the potential for a sector leading resilience co llaboration. TRIG support has been invaluable as it has provided a level of legitimacy to the project that makes adoption of the outputs b y the sector more likely.