This workshop will bring together outstanding scholars from engineering, the social sciences, and mathematics to probe the future of infrastructure research. The workshop will view infrastructure systems as large complex networks that are conglomerates of traditional physical infrastructure (road, telecommunications, water, and energy) networks and social networks. Such complex infrastructure networks will not only be considered as topics of scholarly inquiry but also as cornerstones of national, regional and metropolitan economic viability, quality of life, sustainability, and social justice relied upon by every citizen. The workshop will extend over a three day period, be recorded by professional audio-visual engineers, and streamed live to the entire NSF community. The workshop will explore: (1) alternative notions of sustainability and resilience for complex infrastructure networks; (2) new modeling and computational innovations that make possible the qualitative and numerical study of very large-scale complex infrastructure networks; and (3) integration of modern social network models with traditional network flow models.
If successful, this research will create mathematical tools to help engineers better design and operate infrastructure networks, such as the road network or the electric power grid of a metropolitan region. More specifically, this research effort will employ new ideas from a branch of complexity science called "network science", which describes the evolution of networks, including social networks, over time. The critical step in applying network science to real, physical networks is to blend the tried and true methods of designing and evaluating infrastructure, with new insights into social networks. This integration of the old with the new makes network users both clients and sources of information about the status of a road network, or for that matter any infrastructure network.
It is convenient to refer to The Workshop on Complexity Science Applied to Coupled Infrastructure Systems as InfaPlex; in fact, we shall employ that name throughout this final report. The principle objective of InfraPlex was to develop a conceptual framework for studying sustainable complex infrastructure systems, meant to augment the traditional infrastructure project evaluation paradigm that devolves from engineering economics and comparative statics. More specifically, the workshop explored nontraditional infrastructure engineering design and project evaluation paradigms that explicitly consider multiple objectives, multiple time scales, multiple spatial scales, embedded social networks, resilience, and sustainability. The workshop also considered how to incorporate, within the engineering design and project evaluation process, the widely acknowledged coupling of individual infrastructure networks with one another and with social networks. Full lectures were delivered by several members of the core working group. All participants had the opportunity to describe their infrastructure related research interests, including the role of complexity science therein. Participants were divided into breakout groups that reported findings and discussions leading to those findings to the full workshop body on the second day. The workshop explored: 1. A consensus that there are alternative notions of the sustainability and resilience of infrastructure networks; 2. New modeling and computational innovations that make possible the qualitative and numerical study of very large scale infrastructure networks are emerging; 3. Strong couplings among transportation, telecommunication, financial, energy distribution, and water resource networks definitely occur but are hard to quantify; 4. Performance metrics developed by network science are not yet useful for infrastructure engineering; and 5. Integration of modern social network models with traditional physical networks definitely occurs but, as in point 3 above, is very difficult to quantify in forms for network engineering. InfraPlex has established that: (1)there is a discipline called Infrastructure science and engineering (InfraE); (2)meaningful InfraE graduate degree programs are practical and can be creted from existing courses if a two-semester course covering infrastructure management, design and evolution is created; (3)any InfraE degree program should be closely tied to any national/regional/local security degree programs and research occurring at the degree-granting university; (4)a similar connection to public policy degree programs is also desirable. We provided research opportunities and guidance to several graduate students (some of them are minorities) in the form of research assistantship with funding from this project, we also funded an undergraduate student for research experience. A graduate-level textbook and two graduate level courses by the PI were modified with this project.
