CReDo Phase 2: Developing decision-support use cases

CReDo Phase 2 final report: Developing decision-support use cases

The Phase 2 final report sets out the groundwork for CReDo to develop as a decision-support and cost-benefit analysis tool for the strategic resilience planning use case. In summary:

CReDo can be a helpful decision-support tool for asset operators and regulators

CReDo brings together data from different infrastructure asset operators to model the impact of extreme weather events, taking account of interdependencies within and across infrastructure boundaries. CReDo can be used by asset operators and regulators to make more informed decisions about where best to take action for the benefit of the infrastructure system as a whole (a so-called ‘connected approach’). In Phase 1, we designed an economic evaluation methodology to simulate the potential net benefits of CReDo’s strategic resilience planning use case. We found that CReDo, as a connected digital twin, had the potential to bring a range of benefits to asset operators, their customers and wider society by enabling asset operators to identify cross-network dependencies and pool their strategic investments. The current phase of CReDo (Phase 2) has contributed to the development of CReDo as a decision-support tool by identifying cross-network interdependencies and where coordinated investments across asset operators can achieve a given level of resilience at lower cost.

In Phase 2, CReDo has developed to better reflect realities facing asset operators

During Phase 2 of the project, we focused on developing CReDo to better reflect the realities facing asset operators. Real asset data from UK Power Networks, Anglian Water Group and BT Group was used to characterise the current resilience properties of their networks, including the costs of asset failures to their business and customers, and to reflect the incremental measures that they could undertake at the asset level to improve resilience. We then applied the economic evaluation methodology developed in Phase 1 to this data and compared the potential net benefits of different resilience strategies, from both an individual operator perspective and a system perspective. This economic evaluation is based on a set of cost models that quantify the benefits of avoiding flood-induced asset failures for infrastructure owners, customers and wider society.

The outputs from Phase 2 could help overcome coordination challenges for resilience planning

One of the key outputs from this phase of work is the CReDo measure of ‘asset criticality’. CReDo estimates the criticality of individual assets from a system perspective and an individual ‘siloed’ asset operator perspective by taking account of the total economic costs that are incurred if the asset fails as a result of direct flooding or cascading failures from other assets, whilst also accounting for existing levels of resilience in the system. This measure illustrates where and how a connected approach is likely to add value when making strategic investment decisions, compared to a world where asset operators make those decisions independently of one another. Other outputs from this phase include identifying the pathways of cascading asset outages and the budget impact of resilience investments.

We simulated a case study flood scenario in East England as an illustration of the outputs that CReDo is able to produce

To demonstrate the current decision-support functionality of CReDo, we simulated the impact of different investment decisions for a flood scenario in an area within the East of England. This case study showed that asset operators may prioritise interventions differently depending on their assessment of the criticality of their assets for their networks compared to the criticality of their assets for the system. In particular, we found that a connected approach to system planning can lead to better economic outcomes for a given level of resilience investment, as the system view can identify interventions with larger net benefits by prioritising assets with greater system criticality.

This phase of work also identified further ways that CReDo can add value to decision makers

This phase of work also identified further ways that CReDo can add value to decision-makers. For example, in the future, CReDo may be able to run numerous flood scenarios for a given intervention strategy and approximate the overall expected net benefits of that investment. Additionally, future phases may consider operational response measures, such as rediverting network flows or deploying mobile resources to affected areas, by incorporating inputs such as average response times, site access and other operational factors.

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Read more about CReDo

The CReDo Phase 2 final report has been prepared for the project by Frontier Economics.