Focussing on climate change: Second DeTECToR Progress Meeting is held at HELLER

The consortium of the project DeTECToR (Decision support Tools for Embedding Climate change Thinking on Roads), met again on September 26 and 27, 2017 in Darmstadt for the second progress meeting. The project is part of the Conference of European Directors of Roads (CEDR) transnational research programme and is funded by Germany, The Netherlands, Ireland, Norway, Sweden and Austria. The main goal is to take the consideration of climate change from desk to road with the creation of two sets of decision-support tools and guidance documents related to economic appraisal and procurement.

The project is being carried out by a consortium led by the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL, UK). Besides HELLER Ingenieurgesellschaft mbH the project partners include the companies Alfen Consult GmbH (Germany), Climate and Environment Consulting Potsdam GmbH (Germany), The Road and Bridge Research Institute (IBDiM, Poland) and the Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH (AIT, Austria).

This time the meeting took place at the offices of HELLER in Darmstadt. The Work Package Leads updated the consortium on their areas of the project and afterwards there were in-depth discussions on the main technical points and next steps. „Our main goal at this point in the project is to determine an approach for the cost-benefit-analysis. This is the greatest challenge in the whole project“, reports Marek Skakuj, General Manager at HELLER Ingenieurgesellschaft who is responsible for the software development of the DeTECToR tools. The participants discussed this topic in detail and were able to develop an outline approach. The two DeTECToR tools will be applied in pilot studies in countries with different climates, processes and availability of data. „As all relevant algorithms are specified now, we need to define the case study sites and topics of focus for the pilot studies“, Sarah Reeves, the DeTECToR coordinator from TRL, says. The case study sites selected for the CBA tool will need to cover both areas with less and high risk to test the tool. The procurement tool will be tested in Sweden, The Netherlands and Norway. The DeTECToR tool for cost-benefit-analysis will be applied in pilot studies in Germany, Austria and the UK.

Currently the project has made considerable progress and the next consortium meeting is planned for December 2017 in Warsaw (Poland). The presentation of the final results is scheduled for August 2018.