Live Labs Blog: Kent's Live Labs Journey
Our latest blog is from Carol Valentine at Kent County Council, who talks about their experience of the Live Labs programme.
The ADEPT Lives Labs project has seen our highways and transportation teams at Kent County Council work alongside Amey to research, trial and rollout new initiatives that are improving the way we manage the network for our communities – covering topics that range from safety to risk based gully cleansing, carbon reduction to the use of drone technology to better predict road repairs.
When the Live Labs team was formed over two years ago now, over 50 possible innovations were identified for us to explore. This was broken down into a more manageable approach, categorising the type of innovation and matching these to the need of the business that would deliver the highest impact for our communities.
Multi-functional data platform
The project that has provided the team with the most positive results has been developing the HADMS platform (Highways Asset Digital Management System). This is a data led asset management system with the aim of keeping track of compliance and performance.
Designed by our team at Amey and working closely with managers and staff across highways and transport, we successfully managed to create a platform that can be used day-to-day by our operations teams in Kent.
Network Risk was one area of business to successfully integrate into HADMS. The aim of this workstream was to better understand risk, collision and crash data on our road networks gathering data and insights that could then be used to enhance road schemes at the planning and design stages.
The HADMS platform is multi-functional and has also been developed to look at different areas of the network to improve operational delivery, including the monitoring of winter gritting, work order performance and even keeping track of our trees and canopy coverage. It’s exciting to see this data tool being developed further whilst being used daily by the teams to improve our service provision.
Linking to risk and network planning, we’ve also been trialling traffic monitoring cameras with Vivacity. This trial, which started in September 2020, saw the installation of 32 cameras at eight locations across the county.
These cameras capture how the network is being used, enabling our teams to make more informed decisions when it comes to new traffic schemes and road enhancement improvements. We’ve recently identified more locations for cameras, again to capture traffic patterns that can be reviewed and used to help our teams make informed future decisions on network layouts.
Data and the day-to-day
The use of data to help map maintenance work has also been a large part of our Live Labs projects.
We’ve worked with our drainage teams to roll out ‘Smart Gullies’ across a number of sites in Kent. Using drainage sensors, we’ve were able to trial monitoring gully conditions to ensure that these are cleaned ahead of any adverse weather.
Through Live Labs funding we’ve also been able to look at pothole detection devices placed in the windscreens of our highways maintenance teams to track the location of potholes whilst out on other jobs – increasing efficiencies and accuracy in the detection of road defects. This has been joint working with the company Route Reports.
Collecting data from the trials we’ve completed using drone technology has also been another great success for our Kent Live Labs team. We’ve completed two phases of these trials. The first was completed in 2020 and focused on pothole and road degradation in a car park in our Kent County showground, gathering data to better understand the potential timescales and work needed to repair sites.
Phase two, which was completed in 2021, again looked at road degradation, but also looked at tree canopy coverage and utility assets. This trial was carried out over a live carriageway, something that created its own challenges and excitement for our teams.
We’re now in the process of looking at a potential third phase, which would look at similar data gathering aspects to phase two, however this would be carried out over a high-speed road.
Our Live Labs programme has been a great success. We’ve created the opportunities for our teams to trial new innovations to improve and enhance our service delivery.
The key to our success can be attributed to the collaborative relationships we have with Amey and the third-party organisations that have helped us to deliver these innovative projects. Bringing together the vast knowledge and expertise we’ve been able to implement new innovations that will fundamentally change the way we do things at Kent County Council in the future.