Infrastructure organizations in American cities face several big system-wide challenges. How can they decarbonize their operations and become more resilient against extreme weather events, all while providing reliable services and better social outcomes for citizens?
Meeting these types of challenge will require them to transform the way their whole systems function.
It won’t be enough that individual assets or parts of the system are performing well: Infrastructure systems will need to become more integrated, responsive, and connected, so that every part is geared toward achieving the desired outcomes.
Digital technology can be a key enabler for this transformation, but the right management, governance, processes, and communications also need to be put in place to make the most of the information and analysis that digitalization can provide.
There is no shortage of standards and practices governing how individual parts of infrastructure systems should work. The last decade has seen many of these produced, including some that recognize the cyber-physical nature of modern infrastructure (e.g., digital twins).
But what has been lacking is a framework for how the whole thing should fit together. Organizations need to know how management, operational, engineering, and information systems ought to interact to create a high-performing whole.
Urban Infrastructure Systems in the Digital Age
This is the thinking behind “Urban Infrastructure Systems in the Digital Age,” a two-year program funded by the United Engineering Foundation and delivered by the New York Academy of Sciences, with thought leadership and support from Mott MacDonald.
The program has delivered and published the first iteration of a common framework across engineering disciplines — the Infrastructure Architecture Framework.