Research agenda for an integrated approach to infrastructure planning, design and management

Building on broad discussions between many universities, this paper presents a research agenda based on a holistic, comprehensive view of the issues. It proposes that our infrastructure is a system of systems involving different technical manifestations and social organizations. The implication is that we need a fundamental reconsideration of how we look at system design, away from traditional disciplinary considerations, and toward a multi-domain, multi-disciplinary effort. To this end, it proposes an agenda of: • Comparative analyses across infrastructures and political structures, that would identify commonalities and larger lessons; • Creation of integrated socio-technical models that usefully describe the interactions between the technical infrastructure and its social context; • Methodological efforts, aimed largely at capturing the network characteristics, both technical and social, of the infrastructure system of systems; and • Explicit testing and evaluation of the research through programs of collaboration with practitioners and governmental organizations.