The UK’s ability to respond to the impacts of climate change, increased energy demands, new roads, housing and other infrastructure growth in its towns and cities has been boosted with a £1.2m investment in the Data & Analytics Facility for National Infrastructure (DAFNI) facility.
The funding has been granted as part of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Resource-Only Strategic Equipment (ROSE) fund. This phase of DAFNI’s evolution will be led by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Scientific Computing Department.
Professor Jim Hall, chair of the DAFNI governance board, said: “Following four years of development, the DAFNI platform is now ready to deliver game-changing computational and data services to the community researching into infrastructure systems, allowing more complex and more detailed modelling to take place in universities across the UK, helping to inform government policy at local and national model, on areas from decisions on housing stock type and size to new road and transport links, flood defences and climate change mitigation measures.
“It allows researchers in fields such as transport, energy, population and flooding to more quickly and accurately analyse and research questions such as: how can we protect a city centre from river flooding, where should we site a new railway station, how can we better model climate and environmental impacts on our economy, society and infrastructure?”
DAFNI is a computational platform, purpose-built, hosted and managed by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) in a partnership led by the University of Oxford, and funded for its development years by a grant from the UK Collaboratorium for Research on Infrastructure and Cities (UKCRIC). Cranfield University and University of Cambridge are also members of DAFNI.
