Yotta and Community Models aim to bring a social angle to highways maintenance
Yotta, the leading global connected asset management and services provider, has joined forces with consultancy, Community Models, to help local authorities to make more informed decisions around highways investment, management and maintenance by assessing the social, economic and environmental impact on their communities – rather than just the financial cost, asset conditions or network performance.
Using accessible data, the predictive analysis generated by Community Models helps authorities to better understand how infrastructure decisions impact the quality of life in specific neighbourhoods: including projected job creation, support for economic growth, environmental impact, and changes in levels of access to important public resources such as hospitals and schools. Community Models’ innovative approach recently won development funding from the Local Councils Roads Innovation Group (LCRIG) Steve Berry Think Exceptional Innovation Fund.
The agreement between Community Models and Yotta enables local authorities to combine this intelligence with data from Yotta’s Horizons asset management software suite, ensuring the optimal lifecycle plan for highway assets are in the right place at the right time. Further, by providing strategic perspective, it allows decision-makers within local authorities to better understand, quantify and communicate the full impact of infrastructure investment options (including highways management and maintenance work) to elected members, officers, colleagues, and the public.
Nick Smee, CEO of Yotta, said: “This new agreement is further evidence of how Yotta is innovating to help our customers get ahead with both investment in – and management of – their transport infrastructure. By teaming up with Community Models, we’re supporting local authority Place Teams in supplementing their focus on the asset and network management with additional intelligence around the purpose of the road network in their communities and what the impacts of change will be.
“Highways asset management is changing fast. Local authorities will need to be increasingly aware of the social and environmental impacts of the work they do and how it affects residents. By working with Community Models, we can help get all the data they need to make the best decisions now and in the future.”
As part of the agreement, Yotta will integrate socio-economic data and analysis from Community Models and combine it with asset and network data from the Horizons asset management platform. Analytics can then be completed and a comprehensive dashboard view of all the data generated to help inform local authority decision-making (not only on Highways alone, but with an understanding of impacts on Planning, Economic Development, Regeneration and Place).
