Legacy Assets Research Articles

An overhead line virtual test track for the assessment of railway catenary pantograph interaction

This paper presents the infrastructure geometry of a virtual test track for investigating the dynamic performance of train pantographs and overhead line systems with discrete features including height transitions and overlaps. This has been developed to support cascade of legacy fleets to new regions of the rail network and to better understand how legacy electrification infrastructure can support more modern fleets. The geometry is developed as an ‘obstacle course’ representative of overhead line fitted to legacy routes which have been electrified after their initial construction and is reusable across overhead line equipment types and modelling packages. A range of demonstration results are presented to illustrate application of three pantograph models. The virtual test track geometry and dynamic modelling can be used to assess the performance of catenary/pantograph combinations for overhead line geometries with discrete features and large height variations that are not currently covered by validation methods such as described in BS EN50318. The approach is applicable as a planning tool to establish safe working speeds across a range of overhead line features when full overhead line geometry is not available, or will be too costly to obtain, in the context of extending the utilisation of legacy assets.

Visualising Heritage: using 3D immersive technologies to innovate, document and communicate rich narratives for HS2

The University of Bradford has established wide-ranging skillsets and capabilities as Visualising Heritage that have been built around expertise with 3D imaging for human bioarchaeology and for contextual understanding of archaeological sites, landscapes, heritage structures and associated artefacts. This paper reflects upon how these have been put to use during enabling works for HS2 and also the potential of this work for analysis, public engagement and legacy. The main focus of this paper covers 3D digital documentation of the world's first railway roundhouse designed by Robert Stephenson at Birmingham Curzon Street, together with immersive content that helps to tell the story of its discovery and exposure. We discuss 3D modelling that helps to link both to the original architectural drawings and to the broader narratives for understanding changes to the design of the building during its working life. We also contextualise its place within the historic environment relative to the Principal Building – the original Curzon Street terminus for the London and Birmingham Railway, the Eagle and Tun public house and the former Park Street Cemetery. As HS2 embarks upon the post-excavation phase, we also discuss the potential that recent investment from the Arts and Humanities Research Council in 'Capabilities for Human Bioarchaeology and Digital Collections' offers, building upon our pioneering 3D work at the object scale with 'Digitised Diseases', to bring within reach the potential for high throughput digital capture. This streamlines high fidelity 3D capture for key human bioarchaeology exemplars as legacy assets that would otherwise be lost to future study as they are destined for reburial.

A new framework for using weather‐sensitive surplus power reserves in critical infrastructure

AbstractReserve power systems are widely used to provide power to critical infrastructure systems in the event of power outages. The reserve power system may be subject to regulation, typically focussing on a strict operational time commitment, but the energy involved in supplying reserve power may be highly variable. For example, if heating or cooling is involved, energy consumption may be strongly influenced by prevailing weather conditions and seasonality. Replacing legacy assets (often diesel generators) with modern technologies could offer potential benefits and services back to the wider electricity system when not in use, therefore supporting a transition to low‐carbon energy networks. Drawing on the Great Britain telecommunications systems as an example, this paper demonstrates that meteorological reanalyses can be used to evaluate capacity requirements to maintain the regulated target of 5‐days operational reserve. Across three case‐study regions with diverse weather sensitivities, infrastructure with cooling‐driven electricity demand is shown to increase energy consumption during summer, thus determining the overall capacity of the reserve required and the availability of ‘surplus’ capacity. Lower risk tolerance is shown to lead to a substantial cost increase in terms of capacity required but also enhanced opportunities for surplus capacity. The use of meteorological forecast information is shown to facilitate increased surplus capacity. Availability of surplus capacity is compared to a measure of supply–stress (demand‐net‐wind) on the wider energy network. For infrastructure with cooling‐driven demand (typical of most UK telecommunication assets), it is shown that surplus availability peaks during periods of supply–stress, offering the greatest potential benefit to the national electricity grid.

Neuer Verhaltenskodex für EZB-Ratsmitglieder erzeugt Klärungsbedarf

Abstract The trust placed in a central back is considered its most important asset – especially in turbulent times for monetary policy. In order to avoid any appearance of conflicts of interest, the European Central Bank (ECB) felt motivated to tighten its Code of Conduct for high-level officials at the beginning of 2023. However, an analysis of current self-disclosures by the members of the ECB’s Governing Council on their financial investments indicates a lack of clarity in the new investment rules, which seems to result in inconsistent and partly contradictory disclosures – especially with regard to “legacy assets”. The clarity and comprehensibility of the rules as well as their consistent implementation should therefore be reviewed in order to prevent an erosion of confidence in the ECB.

Digital twin based reinforcement learning for extracting network structures and load patterns in planning and operation of distribution systems

Low voltage distribution networks deliver power to the last mile of the network, but are often legacy assets from a time when low carbon technologies, e.g., electrified heat, storage, and electric vehicles, were not envisaged. Furthermore, exploiting emerging data from distribution networks to provide decision support for adapting planning and operational strategies with system transitions presents a challenge. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a novel application of digital twins based reinforcement learning to improve decision making by a distribution system operator, with key metrics of predictability, responsiveness, interoperability, and automation. The power system states, i.e., network configurations, technological combinations, and load patterns, are captured via a convolutional neural network, chosen for its pattern recognition capability with high-dimensional inputs. The convolutional neural networks are iteratively trained through the fitted Q-iteration algorithm, as a batch mode reinforcement learning, to adapt the planning and operational decisions with the dynamic system transitions. Case studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model by reducing 50% of the investment cost when the system transitions towards the winter and maintaining the power loss and loss of load within 5% compared to the benchmark optimisation. Doubled power consumption was observed in winter under future energy scenarios due to the electrification of heat. The trained model can accurately adapt optimal decisions according to the system changes while reducing the computational time of solving optimisation problems, for a range of scales of distribution systems, demonstrating its potential for scalable deployment by a system operator.

Digital twin development through auto-linking to manage legacy assets in nuclear power plants

Digitalization of Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs) is critical for their safe and effective operation and maintenance. Development of Digital Twins (DTs) of NPP legacy assets and subsystems is key to achieving this goal. Doing this effectively requires a framework for intelligent allocation of limited resources. This framework is developed here by synthesizing emerging best practices with NPP operators' needs for legacy assets management. Within the framework, a pipeline employs deep-learning object detection to read and locate equipment tags in images. It computes their locations in the corresponding 3D point clouds and then relates that data to an asset management system. The pipeline is premised on preservation and augmentation of existing NPP asset management processes that preclude options such as RFID tags or barcodes. It is a significant step toward more efficient development of DTs of legacy assets. The contributions are framed in the context of a typical Canadian legacy NPP.

How digital technologies can reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the energy sector's legacy assets

The global community is increasingly committed to transitioning to green energy technologies. However, while the percentage of the worldʼs energy coming from renewables is growing, the absolute amount of energy delivered to the global marketplace in the form of fossil fuels is also getting bigger, causing the International Energy Agency to recently declare that “it is too soon to see a rapid decline of oil.” This realization carries with it some sobering perspective about what needs to be done by the energy industry to mitigate climate change. Based on a keynote address delivered at the United Nations’ “Resource Management Week 2021” conference, this viewpoint argues that, in tandem to sowing the seeds of tomorrow's renewable energy systems, we also need to reduce the emissions from the systems that we have right now because the evidence in front of us strongly suggests that these legacy energy sources will continue to be around for the short- to medium-term future. To this end, this paper highlights four digital technological developments that have the potential to significantly help the oil & gas industry to make progress on this front: (1) continuing the industry's journey to “smartness,” (2) edge computing, (3) the emergence of global data standards for measuring greenhouse gas emissions, and (4) improving the efficiency of digital infrastructure.

Incumbent Performance Facing Digital Evolution: The Role of Asset Reconfiguration

“Digital revolution” presents great challenges to incumbent firms in many industries. How could incumbents successfully renewal the assets and capabilities in digital innovation shocks is a question remains unanswered. Drawing on strategic adaptation and asset reconfiguration literature, we take a finer grained approach draw a distinction between retrenchment-oriented reconfiguration, and growth-oriented reconfiguration. Using commercial banks’ divestiture of offline branches and adoption of online innovation as the empirical context, our results suggest that incumbents could benefit from divesting devalued legacy assets, while the innovation adoption could contribute to the performance only when the incumbents are also engaging in legacy divestiture simultaneously.

Simulations of orbital debris clouds due to breakup events and their characterisation using the Murchison Widefield Array radio telescope

In this paper we consider the use of wide field of view radar sensors such as the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), a low frequency radio telescope designed for astrophysics and cosmology, for rapid response observations of the debris clouds produced by collisions between objects in Earth orbit. With an increasing density of objects in Low Earth Orbit, including legacy assets used by the astronomy community over decades, the risk of new debris clouds forming is also increasing. The MWA constitutes a wide field, rapid response passive radar system and we explore its likely performance in the detection and characterisation of debris clouds. In general, astronomy facilities such as the MWA can play a role in protecting the space environment for the future. In order to undertake this work, we adapt the NASA EVOLVE 4.0 breakup model, utilising the EVOLVE outputs to produce representative dynamic debris clouds. We find that the MWA is likely to detect a large fraction (>70%) of modelled debris cloud fragments for collision masses between 100 kg and 1000 kg for orbits in the lower part of LEO, if the MWA can achieve close to optimal detection sensitivity. Useful detection fractions are still achieved for more conservative assumptions. The detection fraction of fragments decreases as a function of altitude and inversely with collision mass. Encouragingly, we find that the wide field nature of the MWA allows the full evolving debris clouds to be observed in a single observation, with only $\sim2\%$ of the debris fragments escaping the sensitive portion of the field of view after 100 seconds, for all collision masses and altitudes. These results show that the MWA is an intrinsically useful facility for the rapid characterisation of debris clouds, but that work is required to achieve the data processing within an appropriate timeframe to provide rapid alerts.

Regulatory Forbearance in the U.S. Insurance Industry: The Effects of Eliminating Capital Requirements

This paper documents the long-run effects of an important reform of capital regulation for U.S. insurance companies in 2009. We show that its design effectively eliminates capital requirements for (non-agency) MBS, implying an aggregate capital relief of over $18bn at the time of the reform. By 2015, 40% of all high-yield assets in the overall fixed-income portfolio are MBS investments. This result is primarily driven by insurers' reduced propensity to sell poorly-rated legacy assets. Using a regression discontinuity framework, we can attribute this behavior to capital requirements. We also provide evidence that the insurance industry, driven by large life insurers, crowds out other investors in the new issuance of (high-yield) MBS post reform. Our findings are consistent with the view that the regulation and supervision of the U.S. insurance sector is influenced by short-term industry interests.

‘Restructuring Funds’; an Alternative Tool for a Systemic Approach to Active Management of Unlikely to Pay (UTP)

This paper is aimed at illustrating an innovative tool/strategy to address the general, wider and multifaceted NPL issue from a banking perspective, focusing in particular on UTP; a half-way strategy between a traditional “hold/forbearance” approach and a traditional “portfolio reduction” approach, producing a change in the type of exposure. Such a new, complementary, tool is aimed at overcoming market inefficiencies that other “traditional” approaches/tools currently present and, at the same time, helping to effectively reduce the legacy assets at bearable levels. At the same time this is a “debtor-level” approach that pursues the concentration and coordination of all the exposures of the banking system vis-a-vis the same debtor, as a precondition for a successful restructuring process of corporate borrowers in distress. Such a tool can be identified in a so called “Restructuring Fund”, a specific and peculiar kind of AIF.

Market Freeze and Bank Capital Structure Heterogeneity

This paper develops a theory in which heterogeneity in bank capital choices arises in a general equilibrium despite ex ante identical banks. In a future state, the credit market is partially frozen in a crisis - high-capital banks have continued access to funding liquidity but low-capital banks do not. Inter-bank trading in legacy assets allows some frozen banks to sell assets to banks with “financial muscle” to obtain funding. Consequently, there is a reallocation of access to market funding from low-capital to high-capital banks. Inter-bank trading unfreezes the market without government intervention.

The Viking Fields, Blocks 49/11d, 49/12a, 49/16a, 49/16c, 49/17a, UK North Sea

Abstract The Viking Fields were a gas development in the UK Southern North Sea, c. 130 km east of the Lincolnshire coast in 30 m water depth and covering Blocks 49/11d, 49/12a, 49/16a, 49/16c, 49/17a. The area comprised the Viking A, B, C, D and E Fields. The Viking Fields were discovered in 1965 and started producing in 1972. The development was in two phases from 1971 to 1994 and from 1995 to 2000; the latter phase included the ‘Phoenix development’. The fields continued to produce until September 2015. Plugging and abandonment of the Viking Field wells was complete in 2017, with final decommissioning planned for 2021. The Viking Fields have produced 3.3 tcf of gas from the Rotliegend Group, Leman Sandstone Formation, aeolian-dominated reservoir rocks with a porosity range of 7–25% and average permeability of >100 mD. The Viking reservoirs are impacted by NE--SW De Keyser faults which often delineate and compartmentalize the reservoirs. The final recovery factor for the Viking Fields was 90%. This paper summarizes the geology, development history and performance of these legacy assets.

Orphaned wells, oil assets, and debt: the competing ethics of value creation and care within petrocapitalist projects of return

AbstractThis essay explores the phenomenon known as ‘orphaned wells’, meaning unprofitable oil and gas wells (‘legacy wells’) that have become disentangled from their corporate owners owing to insolvency, or owing to a failure to comply with local regulations. Drawing from an ethnographic example of a near‐insolvent oil and gas corporation in Alberta, Canada, and its strategies of refinancing, the essay explores how value creation and the moral force of the obligation to create a financial return give rise to a ‘durational ethics’ that shapes corporate and financial performativities and prolongs the ‘life’ of legacy oil and gas assets. Legacy assets, understood as potential orphans, are thus caught up in a lively corporate practice of asset circulation and recombination often deployed by producers for the moral work of ‘cleaning balance sheets’. This essay calls for ‘thinking with orphans’ to recognize the competing ethical registers which produce them in addition to the growing need for responsibility and corporate care for legacy oil and gas assets.

An operational effectiveness analysis of legacy and future mine countermeasures systems using discrete event simulation

This paper conducts an operational analysis of legacy and future mine warfare systems using discrete event simulation. The research focuses on a comparative analysis of the MCM-1 Avenger ship, supported by the MH-53E helicopter, and the Littoral Combat Ship, supported by external unmanned systems, in active, defense mine countermeasures operations. The paper develops architectural representations of the functional activities associated with mine countermeasures operations, as well as architectural representations of past, current, and potential future physical entities involved in minehunting and mine neutralization. Those architectural representations are used as the basis for the development of two distinct discrete event simulation models, one corresponding to legacy (MCM-1 Avenger) operations and another corresponding to future (Littoral Combat Ship) operations. The results of the simulation are analyzed using statistical regression. The regression results indicate that the key performance drivers for both the legacy and future systems show considerable overlap, and also suggest that the legacy assets meet or exceed the performance of future assets in several measures of effectiveness. The simulation model for the future assets is reconsidered to develop recommendations regarding alterations to the future force that enable the future force to exceed the operational performance of the legacy force.

Towards factories of the future: migration of industrial legacy automation systems in the cloud computing and Internet-of-things context

ABSTRACT The vision of factories-of-the-future is motivating many industrial companies to modernise their existing portfolio of systems and services to maintain market share and improve business agility. For long-lived industrial systems, it is challenging to adapt legacy assets to a service-oriented stream in cloud computing and Internet-of-things contexts. For this reason, many research studies have proposed techniques and methodologies to migrate legacy industrial functions and systems at different hierarchy levels of automation control. This paper presents an overview of these techniques and methodologies, as well as industry practices to achieve the vision of factories of the future. Better understanding the challenges encountered in legacy migration processes will help researchers and practitioners in their further efforts.

The Illiquidity Fog

This paper develops a theory of how heterogeneity in bank capital choices due to differences in beliefs about the likelihood of a future crisis state leads to partially frozen credit markets in a crisis — some banks have continued access to funding liquidity but others do not, creating an “illiquidity fog”. Interbank trading in legacy assets allows some frozen banks to sell assets to obtain funding. Consequently, there is a reallocation of access to market funding from low-capital banks to high-capital banks. There are strategic complementarities in the capital choices of high-capital and low-capital banks, leading to a “capital structure contagion”.

LIBOR—Hazards on the Road to Reform

The London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) is one of the most widely used reference rates in the world of finance. Recent information indicates that nearly $200 trillion in contractual exposures reference USD LIBOR, of which roughly 95% is notional amount exposure under derivatives contracts, with approximately $8 trillion in exposure under corporate loans, consumer debt (primarily mortgages), floating-rate notes, and securitized products. As described in this article, the future of LIBOR is uncertain, and it may be phased out altogether in favor of new reference rates based on much more robust market data. This article describes the reasons for LIBOR’s potential demise, its replacement in the United States, and the impact on legacy assets and asset-backed securities (ABS) transactions in the United States. <b>TOPICS:</b>Legal and regulatory issues for structured finance, legal/regulatory/public policy

NPLs resolution regimes: Challenges for regulatory authorities

Banks around the globe are struggling with high levels of non-performing loans (NPLs). The crisis and subsequent recession have left businesses and households in many countries with over-indebtedness, which depresses consumption and investment. Significant banking sector resources are absorbed by legacy assets that make banks more reluctant to extend credit and support new viable investment projects. NPLs resolution is needed in order for banks to resume lending and the issues should be addressed with some form of central intervention, that is, government assistance. Two approaches are available: the creation of a bad bank, which aggregates all NPLs; or the creation of internal work-out units within the banks for specialised management of problematic loans. The optimal solution is not unique and depends on the economic and political environment, the institutional framework as well as the intensity of the problem. Whatever solution is chosen, however, it poses specific challenges for regulatory authorities both from a macroprudential and a microprudential perspective. From a macroprudential perspective the NPLs resolution policy, the NPLs persistence and toxicity, the adverse feedback loop in macrofinancial linkages, the form of intervention and private debt overhang are considered. From a microprudential perspective, the supervisory protection layers, the data adequacy for credit assessment as well as challenges from the new business model, are of interest. Finally, the theoretical analysis is supported by international evidences.

Bailout Stigma

We develop a model of bailout stigma where accepting a bailout signals a firm's balance-sheet weakness and worsens its funding prospect. To avoid stigma, a firm with high-quality legacy assets either withdraws from subsequent financing after receiving a bailout or refuses a bailout altogether to send a favorable signal. The former leads to a short-lived stimulation with subsequent market freeze even worse than if there were no bailout. The latter revives the funding market, albeit with delay, to the level achievable without any stigma. Strikingly, a bailout offer is most effective when many firms reject it (to build a favorable reputation) rather than accept it.