I am immensely proud to be writing an Editorial for a themed issue on the 2021 International Symposia for Next Generation Infrastructure (ISNGI), which not even Covid-19 or cancellation of the symposia at which the papers published here were to be presented could stop. In addition to severely disrupting all aspects of life in infrastructure-enabled societies across the globe, Covid-19 spurred the rapid uptake and normalisation of digital information processes and technologies (DIPT). For example, applications such as Zoom, which were unknown to most prior to Covid-19, emerged in response to lockdowns and rapidly established themselves as critical enablers of many of our working lives.
The existence of this themed issue of Smart Infrastructure and Construction on ISNGI 2021 is both a testament to, and exploration of, the power and value of DIPT and the enabling infrastructure systems that underpin them. It is a testament to DIPT and enabling infrastructure systems because without them, the ISNGI, UK Collaboratorium for Research on Infrastructure and Cities (UKCRIC) and editorial teams would simply have been unable to compile this themed issue during a global pandemic. It is an exploration of DIPT and enabling infrastructure systems because the three papers it publishes all acknowledge the criticality of infrastructure systems and present research relating to the investigation, utilisation and systemic development of DIPT and digital infrastructure systems.
In the first paper of this issue, Bellamy et al. (2023) review three digitalisation projects from the Building Innovation Partnership (BIP) – an industry-led research and innovation initiative, based at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand – and focus on improving the transfer of infrastructure information within and between organisations in order to lift the productivity and efficiency of the construction industry, to improve the performance of buildings and other built infrastructure, and ultimately improve the performance and economics of horizontal and vertical infrastructure.
To better understand why few construction firms or infrastructure service providers are transforming their business around digital strategies, Bellamy et al. (2023) identify the potential benefits of and barriers to DIPT uptake. They identify the benefits as including improved productivity, safer operations, higher accuracy, better communication and more innovation. They identify poor understanding of the value of DIPT, difficulties crafting and executing well-integrated digital strategies and the global shortage of digital skills as potential barriers to digital transformation. They conclude that DIPT is an opportunity to change historic asset management and construction processes while incorporating new and exciting technologies. The capability of industry to transfer digital information needs to be lifted if the benefits of DIPT are to be exploited in the construction and infrastructure sectors; the productivity paradox of trying to overlay new technology onto existing and inefficient business processes or operations must be avoided.
Bellamy et al. (2023) frame digital transformation as a disruptive improvement that can assist the construction and infrastructure sectors to overcome challenges such as ageing infrastructure, urban growth and climate change. DIPT can provide a platform for integrated decision making, where the ever-increasing complexity of multiple considerations and data streams can be brought together to improve investment decision making. An argument firmly embraced by Matthews et al. (2023) in the second paper in this issue.
With a particular focus on the Data and Analytics Facility for National Infrastructure, a major national facility under development in the UK that aims to provide a world-leading capability to enable advance infrastructure systems research, Matthews et al. (2023) make a compelling case that as infrastructure systems become ever-more complex, research into the performance of infrastructure systems is likely to become increasingly data intensive. Infrastructure systems models capable of capturing this increasing complexity will be needed in order to effectively inform all types of strategic decision (including policy). All of this creates an increasing need for advanced large-scale computing and data infrastructure to manage and enable the systemic curation, integration and analysis of data drawn from an increasingly diverse range of sources and geographic scales.
The third paper in this issue by Mahabadi et al. (2023) focuses on the challenges of modelling complex systems, particularly the use of multilayer network models to analyse the robustness of infrastructure systems. Mahabadi et al. (2023) present the type of systematic literature review needed to support the development of the capability to model infrastructure systems as complex adaptive systems. The findings emerging from the study – in particular, the observations of the absence of models based on real-world data; the need for models that make fewer simplifying assumptions about complex systems; the tendency of methodologies that assess the robustness of multilayer networks to be based upon over-simplified models; and the absence of papers considering all potential properties, or the significance of the interdependencies between them when assessing, and seeking to quantify, the robustness of infrastructure systems – all resonate strongly with themes identified by Bellamy et al. (2023) and Matthews et al. (2023).
And finally, the ISNGI symposia series made a successful return in 2022, hosting a symposia in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, that focused on three interdependent themes: sustainable and resilient infrastructure systems; smart and integrated infrastructure systems; and societal values and infrastructure governance. The strength of the ISNGI series is the ability to bring together international interdisciplinary perspectives and to identify areas of common purpose. One of the key messages emerging from ISNGI 2022 was the urgent need for a bold intergenerational vision of the positive societal, economic and environmental outcomes that infrastructure systems are expected to enable; and, as significantly, the negative outcomes infrastructure systems must initially avoid exacerbating and ultimately help transform (Dolan, 2022).
Additionally, ISNGI 2024 has been tentatively scheduled to take place at University College London’s UKCRIC PEARL Facility in London, UK. More details will be available at www.isngi.org in the near future.
