Operations and systems
Worldwide, ports are upgrading their infrastructure and adjusting their operations to take advantage of new technologies, meet the needs of larger vessels, decarbonise, and adapt to the impacts of climate change.
For some, the offshore renewable energy market provides new opportunities but also new requirements. Managing coastal change is also increasingly challenging as climate risks increase. And all these projects play important roles in local and regional socioeconomic development.
In many locations, planning improvements involves complex interactions with varied private and public stakeholders and working with stretched local supply chains. Requirements such as electrification and digitalisation mean new specialist skill sets are needed.
Managing the interface between terrestrial interests and the sea has always been a complex evaluation. Balancing nature, human, and economic interests while working with natural processes is a delicate operation.
What can we do for you?
We work with public and private infrastructure owners and operators to deliver their complex systems into service, so that they can achieve their intended societal outcomes. We build confidence, assurance and clarity, often where there’s no precedent.
Years before the first passengers pay and get on board, and your first rolling stock leaves the depot, making informed and consistent decisions can influence better outcomes for you, your stakeholders, and your users.
Our systems engineering and integration approach can help prevent many of the challenges that major projects encounter. Avoiding costly delays to delivery because digital technologies fail to work well with physical assets, or late compromises in the outcomes achieved because maintenance and operations can’t align with the original aims and prove too costly.
By applying our holistic model and technical excellence, we enable you to define and understand the requirements for your systems, guide their design, and successfully deliver, integrate, test, assure and bring them into operation.
We do that by:
- Realising your systems engineering and integration requirements
Our experts work with you to define your project’s scope, objectives and needs, and to develop concepts for its successful operation. We leverage this to help define your system requirements and our interdisciplinary excellence to inform and create an effective design. Our staged approach supports you to undertake better systems engineering enter the construction process with greater confidence. - Establishing assurance and achieving operational readiness
We enable you to successfully prepare your well-integrated systems for effective and efficient service. Our model builds progressive assurance, so you’ve got confidence at every point, even when it’s first-of-a-kind.
This includes establishing and delivering staged testing processes – from subsystems into systems testing and commissioning. We support you to create and undertake safe and comprehensive trials - addressing risk, building your resilience and shaping operations. - Shaping successful operations
Alongside expert engineering and design for your infrastructure assets and technologies, we help you identify and integrate the high-performance processes – for your organisation’s people, digital technologies, maintenance and asset management.
Ultimately, we help you to steward well-designed systems to become well-operated and run services in the long-term.
Mantoloking Seawall, New Jersey, USA. We were retained to provide assistance with design, financing, and construction observation for a seawall to be built from steel sheet pilings along 5.6km of waterfront.
Sustainable engineering for ports and coastal infrastructure
Our ports, coastal, and offshore team are multidisciplinary, giving you access to integrated transport, energy and water, environmental, decarbonisation, climate resilience, geotechnical, and buildings solutions.
Meet the team
Our experience
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Berwickshire coastal change adaptation program, UKWe developed a strategic coastal management policy for the local council’s 40km shoreline which incorporated Adaptation Scotland initiatives and terminology, Scotland’s National Performance Framework National Outcomes and UN Sustainable Development Goals.
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Central Rhyl sea defences, UKIn this project for Balfour Beatty Scape and Denbighshire Borough Council, we developed designs for improvements to this 2.8km amenity frontage in the town center. The scope included numerical modelling of waves, overtopping assessments, longshore drift assessments, design of concrete stepped revetment, rock toe protection, and steps and ramps, all developed and designed to suit the contractor’s construction methodology.
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Changing Coasts project, Yorkshire, UKThis work concerned development of a monitoring, evaluation, and learning plan for a coastal adaptation project designed to prepare coastal communities in Yorkshire for long term, climate driven coastal change as part of the Environment Agency’s Coastal Transition Accelerator Program. The plan covered data needed for physical transition activities, changes to local and national policies, project costs, stakeholder engagement, environmental assessments (including heritage, carbon and natural capital), and economic assessments. Our system mapping approach provided the client and stakeholders with an understanding of the project’s complexities and how their area of focus might be impacted or influenced by others, sometimes unexpectedly.
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Future Port Talbot, UKWe were appointed by Associated British Ports to develop a masterplan showing how Port Talbot could be transformed to enable it to serve as a prime hub for the floating offshore wind industry, contributing to the decarbonization of industry in south Wales and playing a major role in the socioeconomic regeneration of the area. We have supported with early stage designs of required infrastructure, the undertaking of required environmental surveys, and the development of environmental assessment documentation.
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Mantoloking Seawall, New Jersey, USAIn October 2012, a storm surge from Hurricane Sandy cut through the narrow section of the Barnegat Peninsula where the Borough of Mantoloking is located. We were retained to provide assistance with design, financing, and construction observation for a seawall to be built from steel sheet pilings along 3.5 miles (5.6 km) of waterfront in Mantoloking and Brick Township.
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NortH2 offshore wind and hydrogen project, Netherlands and north GermanyNorthH2 will create the world’s largest system of offshore wind farms, transmitting power onshore to produce green hydrogen by electrolysis, then transporting the hydrogen via converted gas infrastructure to industrial centers in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, including a bulk underground salt cavern storage near Zuidwending.
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Port of Felixstowe, UKWe have helped the UK’s largest container terminal with several major capital projects over the past few years which have led to increases in berthing lengths and operational yard space, deeper quays, and new facilities. We have also carried out tender and detailed design on a range of different port infrastructure projects and provided technical and contractual support during construction.
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Port of St Helier, JerseyWe drew up a masterplan for transformative strategic development over 25 years at this city port in the Channel Islands and were appointed to support the client in developing an implementation program and design-required infrastructure.
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Puerto Caucedo multimodal terminal, Dominican RepublicOver a ten-year period, we have supported the port across a suite of projects with a range of services including master planning, feasibility studies, detailed designs, hydrodynamic modeling, and contractor procurement and supervision.
Carbon Portal
Identify, calculate, and reduce embodied and operational carbon emissions. This infrastructure carbon calculator is aligned to PAS 2080, the international specification for managing carbon across the built environment (coauthored by Mott MacDonald). It allows anyone across your business and supply chain to identify and calculate carbon emissions, not just carbon experts.
