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Smart City
Published in Tugrul Daim, Marina Dabić, Yu-Shan Su, The Routledge Companion to Technology Management, 2023
Infrastructure refers to the basic physical and organizational structure and facilities needed for society and companies to operate, such as buildings, roads, and power supply. Infrastructure has always been at the center of cities and must meet the needs for social planning, operations, and safety. Since the beginning of the 21st century, these infrastructures have become increasingly smarter. Information on infrastructure is provided through a variety of sensors and affects decision-making on changes to infrastructure. It is also used to provide the end users of infrastructure with valuable services. These services must be provided reliably, economically, and flexibly, such as affordable electricity and high-quality water and transportation (Annaswamy, Malekpour & Baros, 2016).
Introduction
Published in Sharon McClements, Infrastructure Procurement and Funding, 2022
Infrastructure is vital for the development and functioning of society. The term infrastructure emanated out of World War II where it was initially employed as a military reference to denote ‘underlying’ structures. Subsequently, ‘infrastructure’ was adopted by development economists to describe ‘social overhead capital’ and is now a widely recognised expression (Howes and Robinson, 2005). Yet, as there is growing demand for greater investment in national infrastructure projects, the term infrastructure has now become increasingly attractive to both Government and investors, even though, at the same time, it has also been widely acknowledged there has been, globally, a long-term sustained lack of investment. Therefore, ‘infrastructure’ now has political, economic and environmental attributes.
Applying Design Thinking Principles on Major Infrastructure Projects
Published in Edward Ochieng, Tarila Zuofa, Sulafa Badi, Routledge Handbook of Planning and Management of Global Strategic Infrastructure Projects, 2020
Infrastructure projects are inherently demanding as they must deal with conflicting aims and requirements from multiple stakeholders with differing motivations; their execution is constrained by political, financial, technological and resource provisions and supports. Traditional “plan and execute” linear methods – brief, design, construct and deliver – are effective only when uncertainties are low. However, the increased uncertainties and complexities in infrastructure projects in the past three decades call for new approaches to create value rather than the traditional linear methods that merely focus on cutting cost and duration with rigid structures like a Gantt chart. It is vital to rethink how to run modern infrastructure projects and one way of doing that is “systems thinking,” since a project can be considered as a complex, multiple-loop, non-linear, social system with a strong impact of human actors on decision-making (Aramo-Immonen and Vanharanta, 2009).
Flexibility and adaptability within the context of decision-making in infrastructure management
Published in Structure and Infrastructure Engineering, 2022
Mauricio Sánchez-Silva, Wilmar Calderón-Guevara
These and other aspects do not only impose a technical challenge but are conditioned by the uncertainties about their occurrence, and the nature and size of modifications that they may impose on any system. In a highly dynamic world where the environment (e.g. climate change), the technology and the geopolitics change continuously, long-term predictions of future conditions based on past trends only becomes a highly unreliable approach. Modern infrastructure needs to support the rapid deployment and growth of nascent technologies (such as renewable electricity generation, sewage systems, material reuse and autonomous and electric vehicles) as well as technologies that we have not yet begun to envision (Chester & Allenby, 2019). In summary, as systems become more complex the need for flexibility and adaptability becomes more important as tool for handling uncertainty.
Water infrastructure in Asia: financing and policy options
Published in International Journal of Water Resources Development, 2022
Edoardo Borgomeo, Bill Kingdom, Judith Plummer-Braeckman, Winston Yu
Public and private finance can provide the incremental resources needed to get the infrastructure in place, but it is important to emphasize that, in the end, water infrastructure will be paid through one of the three basic funding sources of tariffs, transfers or taxes. However, only some water infrastructure can generate tariffs (e.g., water supply and sanitation) that could be used to service such borrowing, and then only if the level of such tariffs is sufficient and sustainable and if tariffs can be collected. Some other types of water infrastructure, such as flood control infrastructure, can be repaid through property taxes on real estate whose value might benefit from increased protection. When funding sources are uncertain, it will be more difficult to mobilize the repayable financing needed to build water infrastructure, especially from the private sector.
Wildfire risk, post-fire debris flows, and transportation infrastructure vulnerability
Published in Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure, 2022
Andrew M. Fraser, Mikhail V. Chester, B. Shane Underwood
With increasing recognition that climate change hazards will produce complex impacts on natural and built environments, it is critical that resilient infrastructure strategies embrace this complexity. One challenge that illustrates this complexity is the combined effect of an extreme wildfire (i.e., strand-replacing fires, crown fires, or fires with high fireline intensity) followed by common precipitation events and the impact on downstream infrastructure. Wildfires followed by common precipitation events often produce water and debris flows several orders of magnitude greater than the precipitation event alone (Neary et al., 2012). Such flows are potentially outside the safety tolerance for infrastructure. For example, peak flow rates following the Rodeo–Chediski fire in Arizona were found to be as high as 2350 times the rates measured under pre-burned conditions (Ffolliott & Neary, 2003). Worse still, engineers lack the science to understand these interactions and in some cases are ill-equipped to design against them.