Supporting Cross-sectoral Infrastructure Investment Planning

This PhD dissertation aims to facilitate the identification of investment and coordination opportunities in time and space and across infrastructure systems. It takes into account infrastructure interdependencies and the uncertainties of future behavioural, socio-economic, policy, and technological developments. Infrastructure systems in this study are viewed as socio-technical systems, with interactions among demand and social entities’ decisions resulting in emergent performance patterns. The primary focus here is to explore the potential short- and long-term demand and performance changes of interconnected infrastructure networks, leading to an investigation of the state changes across systems.
The dissertation concentrates on the interactions among the energy, rail, road, and waterway systems. These systems necessitate substantial investments due to their ageing states and near-capacity operations, and they are subject to disruptive technology and significant policy developments. The thesis narrows down the social entities to operational decision-makers in the transport layer of the logistics chain, given that freight logistics systems play a pivotal role in affecting, shaping, and supporting infrastructure developments, as well as trade and economic activities. Among the various decision-making layers of freight logistics chains (i.e., production and consumption, trade, distribution, and trans-port), short-term decisions and the performance of transport infrastructure systems have a more direct bidirectional influence.
The research approach is centred around developing sets of models that explore demand and performance developments of interdependent infrastructure systems and trace their interaction with operational decisions under plausible future scenarios. The thesis aims to achieve its research target through a step-wise approach. First, the major components required for integrated investment planning in interdependent socio-technical infrastructure systems are included in a modelling framework. Subsequently, the thesis proposes sets of models (comprising coupled sub-models) to formalise the major components included in the first research step in greater detail.