Infrastructure managers increasingly have to deliver to defined performance levels, related to system reliability, availability and life cycle costs, as a result of increasing pressures from governments and operators. This paper will investigate the consequences of this development for the newly established European Railway's infrastructure managers (IMs). It particularly focuses on the state of ...
Institutional and technological changes concerning networked infrastructures, and increasing interdependency between these infrastructures necessitate a different view on their design and management. Responsibilities are no longer in one hand as they often used to be, and failures in systems may impact larger parts of the infrastructures, leading to serious service disruptions. This paper ...
Explains how to optimize the operation of water supply systems and the related advances in SCADA – Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition – systems Examines the advances in design and construction methods such as BIM – Building Information Modeling Explains municipal budgeting, chain of planning, programming, and other related subjects Includes new information ...
During the last decades, airports have been substantially transformed in a dynamic and competitive industry. Today each airport faces the challenging task of coordinating all the services provided to work efficiently. Airports need to find a way to overcome economic, financial and infrastructural problems in a coherent attempt of definition of a conceptual framework of the airport business as a ...
The growth rate of Korean business incubators (BI) is explosive compared to growth rate of incubation programs in the United States of America. The authors' secondary and primary research reveals that the stresses of rapid growth exposed difficulties with existing models. These difficulties can be better addressed by working models that extend existing, descriptive frameworks and models. It is ...
This paper discusses governance as a promising approach for dealing with the risks of infrastructures, and specifically with reference to the European situation. The liberalisation and the unbundling of the institutional and market arrangements and the pervasive application of information and communication technologies have increased the interconnectivity among systems and nations, making risks ...
This paper investigates the role of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in economic development in Malaysia for the period 1970–2007. More specifically, the study investigates the direct impact of FDI on economic growth in Malaysia and the FDI determinants in an endogenous economic growth framework. Data is analysed using three-stage least squares. The results reveal that contrary to the held view of ...
ABSTRACTA companion paper dealt with the tasks required to investigate and assess the components of non-revenue water (NRW). This is a necessary first step in a diagnostic approach to understanding the condition of the network, the way that it is operated, and the constraints acting upon it. This second part deals with the tasks and tools required to address the constraints, and to develop a ...
In the wake of economic globalisation trends, for many seaports, privatisation is under serious consideration. Transfer of property rights from the public to the private sector has a number of consequences right from the way in which key functions in ports are performed. This paper, after presenting the state-of-the-art theory on port management and port privatisation, claims that current ...
This paper aims to enable the relevant use of water main service lifetime and failure data to build a medium or long term infrastructure management plan. Firstly, how to estimate the service lifetime distribution of water mains using observations of decommissioning times which are possibly left-truncated and predominantly right-censored, is shown. Three methods are presented: a non-parametric ...
The infrastructure asset management (IAM) planning software application (PLAN) is a decision-support environment, developed under TRUST, which is providing organized assessment and comparison for any number of competing projects, solutions or alternative designs, which can be assessed and pitched against each other, both numerically as well as visually. PLAN was designed as the central planning ...
Infrastructure resilience has drawn significant attention in recent years, partly because the occurrence of low-probability and high-consequence disruptive events like Hurricane Katrina, the Indonesian tsunami, terrorism attack in New York, and others. Since civil infrastructure systems support society welfare and viability, continuous infrastructural operation is critical. Along protection ...
Infrastructures are vital to our economy and society. The papers in this special issue address the state of the art in research on infrastructures design, management, and operation. A number of interrelated themes that allow analysing and structuring the vast number of research projects and themes have been identified. These themes have been taken from a large research programme 'Next Generation ...
The research results presented aim to define a framework for evaluating the potential of resilience for critical infrastructure (CI). CI are an integral part of the community and a better knowledge of their potential for resilience will help to reduce the risk of disasters and provide tools to manage them. The framework helped to define a method to evaluate the potential for resilience CI based ...
Regulation, as it was introduced to round off the great institutional changes in the critical infrastructures, has failed to fully curb strategic behaviour in these sectors. This is one of the reasons for the somewhat disappointing performance of these sectors. Regulation in its present shape is based on the mantra: independent, rule guided and transparent. This paper sets out how these ...
The urban water structure is aging and in need of rehabilitation. Further, the need to address future challenges (climate change, urban development) also arise lines. This study investigates if it is possible to combine rehabilitation and adaptation measures. To do so, we combined an urban development model, an urban drainage model and a rehabilitation model. A case study of a medium-sized ...
This paper aims at presenting key perspectives of local public-private partnerships (PPPs) in Greece in respect with the effort of adapting urban governance towards sustainability. It is structured into three main units. Firstly, it attempts to define PPPs in general and in environmental policy, in particular. Secondly, it draws upon an analysis of local government reforms in Greece and the ...
As telecommunications technology has advanced, citizens assume that their communication devices are capable of soliciting emergency assistance. According to Marc Andreessen, developments in information technology are finding their way first to consumers and only later making their way into other arenas (The Economist, 2011). Text, video and calls from voice over IP (VOIP) phones are increasingly ...
Cities eliminate backups & overflows with remote manhole monitoring Sewer backups are an ongoing problem for municipalities in the U.S. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, up to 75,000 annual backups and overflows account for 10 billion gal of untreated wastewater discharge. Underground infrastructure management is difficult for many utilities, but there is equipment that ...
Noting the signals coming from the community of complex critical infrastructures management indicating, on the one hand, a definite preoccupation with identifying and properly characterising system vulnerabilities and, on the other hand, a dissatisfaction with (generally) expert capabilities to provide the effective ways and means sought, this paper submits that contributing to the situation is ...