The other day I went to a “cyber/physical forum”. To my disappointment this did not involve any android speakers and nor did any of the experience resemble “Tron”. In fact, of course, this is another spin of the jargon-wheel-of-fortune that has given us “digital twins”, “the metaverse” and “synthetic reality”. Although the names used may not always be very attractive, the underlying phenomenon could not be more significant: increasingly we will manage the world around us with and through digital means.
The William Gibson observation that “The future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed” certainly seems to be valid in transport: we have been talking about the way that digitalisation will transform the transport industry, and transport infrastructure, for ages, but day by day the pace of change seems imperceptible.
The factors influencing the diffusion of innovation have been the stuff of entry-level economics education for a very long time. On the other hand, there is still a lot of disagreement on how important an effect this is, and what can be done to accelerate it. The story of economic history; of why the UK entered the industrial revolution first, or of why a particular city, region or country is particularly successful in a given trade or industry is, to a great extent, the story of how innovation arises and what enables it, or prevents it from spreading.
Now this is (to me, at least) very interesting but why is it relevant to the transport industry just now? The answer is that the transport industry, and its associated infrastructure, manufacturing and services industries have, historically, been fairly conservative and resistant to change and, by the way, not always for bad reasons (the dramatic improvements in safety we have seen in air travel, on the railways and on the roads, have required a lot of very careful improvements which have been guarded by some deliberate barriers to change). But over the next few years we very definitely need dramatic change as we decarbonise transport and associated industries. I am hopeful that those changes can also bring improvements in transport accessibility to deliver fairer outcomes and can enable better lives to those who depend on transport…which is everyone. Significant change is urgent and non-negotiable, and can make a lot of things better.
The current orthodoxy will have you believe that dramatic and urgent change is best delivered by ‘disruptors’, which is to say, new companies touting new products and services who will enter traditional markets and sweep away out-of-date practices, make everything better and make their founders and their venture capital backers absurdly rich. We can leave to one side, for the moment, the debate about whether this is always as beneficial as it is sometimes presented. What is sure, is that in transport there is a very strong public interest and, in most countries, a very strong public sector involvement. The average road, around the world, is built by the government and paid for, directly or indirectly, through taxation. The ‘disruptor’ model may not work so efficiently in the UK: even if a start-up comes up with a magical way to build or maintain a road with zero carbon footprint, how easily and quickly could it actually be adopted by a county council?
There are plenty of examples of where apparently useful technologies have stalled, or made only slow headway, in this sort of environment. For example, 3D design programmes, which have been around for nearly half a century, are deployed patchily: horror stories abound of designs in 3D having to be expensively re-rendered in 2D to be passed onto another phase of the build and maintenance cycle where the skills or systems do not support the original 3D model. Of course there are many examples of excellence too, but the common factor preventing a more consistent level of exploitation of innovation is organisational, not technical.
One of the primary reasons for a lag in adoption is the way that new technologies (particularly IT) are cost justified. Initially a new technology is seen through the lens of the current way of doing things, and so innovations tend to be assessed on efficiency business cases: do what you did before but faster and more cheaply. So, for example, Transport for London’s Oyster scheme was introduced as a convenient way to manage traditional ticketing (a way that saved money and time for TfL as much as for the traveller) and took time to evolve to a ticketless, contactless model that changes people’s relationship with public transport by dramatically reducing the ‘friction’ associated with paying for travel authorisation. A transformational business case means doing something new, or differently. It takes a lot longer for transformational business cases to be understood and accepted.
To get the full benefit of, for instance, a digital representation of a road asset, we need the digital asset (i.e the representation, or model, of the physical asset in the digital domain) to track the physical asset throughout its entire lifecycle (the design, which, nowadays, pretty much always starts as a digital model), needs to be updated as the asset is built and commissioned and then it can be updated with new ‘layers’ of information as the asset is put into use, its conditioned is monitored, it is maintained and upgraded and eventually, perhaps, repurposed or recycled. This is the notion of a ‘digital twin’ or a ‘cyber/physical pair’. A lot of globally pioneering work has been done in the UK on this concept and an advanced demonstrator has shown the benefits of connecting digital twins of water and energy industry assets, for example to predict, evaluate and respond to flooding events that can impact electricity supply.
However, this is where the organisational barriers come up. Design, construction, and operation are frequently the responsibilities of different departments. The actual work is likely to be done by a patchwork of different companies, all competing on price to get a particular slice of the work. The metrics driving each of the organisations will be focused on optimising their particular piece and the most basic tenet of system engineering is that you do not optimise a system by optimising the individual sub-systems. Yes, in order to decarbonise and improve transport we need to do a lot of research and development in individual technologies...but I do not believe that is the biggest challenge. We are not even utilising the technology we have fully, and will not be able to manage the rate and scale of change we need, until we look at the way we structure and run the industry.
The blockbuster film ‘The Matrix’ is set in a world where (almost) every human on earth is plugged into a single, enormous system that simulates every aspect of an alternative, virtual world whilst their biological needs are catered for by vast systems that feed and water them. Am I the only one who wonders who wrote the tender for those systems and how many project meetings and contract amendments did it take until it all worked so perfectly?
