Detecting Joint Investment among interdependent infrastructure systems

Infrastructure systems (e.g. road, rail, energy, water) currently require vast amount of investments to be able to respond to short- and long-term social, technological and environmental developments such as an increasing mobility demand, and the transition towards alternative energy solutions. Currently most of the investments are planned through a silo-based approach ignoring interdependencies among infrastructure systems and by doing so missing scale and innovation opportunities. Although scholars have paid much attention to the risk of infrastructure interdependencies as response to exogenous threats like climate change and terrorism, studies on the opportunities for joint investments emerging from infrastructure interdependencies are scarce. This paper proposes a framework and an agent-based model at its core to assist decision-makers at infrastructure agencies to (i) introduce sector-specific investment portfolios, and (ii) identify investment opportunities upon which they can form cross-sectoral resource alignments and integration. The framework allows infrastructure agencies to reveal infrastructure interdependencies by simulating the propagated state changes induced through sector-specific investments.