Hello everyone and welcome back to the course.
In this video we will introduce you to the basic concepts that we use in discussing the
socio-technical complexity of infrastructure systems.
For this purpose we have provided a glossary of important terms that we use throughout
the course.
Please read through it and familiarize yourself with these terms and what they mean.
What you should first wonder about is:
what is the definition of infrastructure, or:
what is a useful definition of infrastructure?
If you think about infrastructures, the first thing that probably comes to mind is a highway
or a railroad network, or any other large scale technological system.
Imagine cables, pipelines, roads or rail that interconnect things like people, buildings
and cities.
The scale of this system may be:
Local or regional, as in the case of drinking water and sewage infrastructure.
However, most of today's infrastructure systems cross national borders.
They span entire continents or even the globe.
Think of electricity infrastructures, and of course telecommunication networks and the
internet.
If your focus is on the physical reality, then you will appreciate infrastructures as
truly impressive feats of engineering.
They are the megastructures of modern times.
Infrastructures are incredibly complex physical networks, composed of millions of links and
nodes.
We can also think of the technological expert knowledge that we need to design, build, maintain
and operate these infrastructures.
Without science and engineering knowledge, infrastructures could never have been brought
into being.
They physically manifest themselves in our landscape in the form of roads, railways,
airports and seaports, overhead lines and other capital intensive hardware.
However, the technological or physical dimension is only part of the story of infrastructure.
A social scientist studying infrastructure will see a social system, in which millions
of users are interconnected.
He will also see a system that connects the producers with the users of a specific service.
And what the social scientist sees is as relevant as what the engineering scientist sees.
So infrastructures have a physical and a social dimension.
And even if, for the sake of scientific analysis, we tend to separate the two dimensions, they
cannot be separated in practice.
For example, car owners are not likely to switch to electric vehicles if they cost much
more than a conventional vehicle, or if there are only limited means for charging them.
One of our challenges in this course is therefore to understand, deeply understand ￼ infrastructures
as socio-technical systems.
In such systems, a complex physical network is intertwined with a complex social network.
Each infrastructure system was brought into being to provide a specific service that we
consider essential for our well being, for socio-economic development.
The provision of safe drinking water and the treatment of wastewater and solid wastes are
obviously essential for public health.
Infrastructures for mobility of people and goods have allowed us to explore the world.
They have expanded markets and enabled global trade.
In modern societies everything depends on the uninterrupted supply of electricity, communication
and information services.
In fact, infrastructure related services are so essential, that national governments take
responsibility for the accessibility, availability, affordability and social acceptability of
these services.
This may imply that the infrastructure is owned and operated by a government body.
However, as we will see, there are alternative ways to ensure the reliability and quality
of infrastructure related services.
Let us take the example of the electricity infrastructure.
The first true electricity infrastructure came online in 1882.
It consisted of a single coal fired generator providing power to the light bulbs of 59 customers
within a New York neighborhood.
Soon, similar systems sprouted in major cities around the world.
Eventually, these local neighborhood systems were expanded to link entire urban areas with
a diversity of electrical devices and multiple generators operating simultaneously.
Gradually, these isolated urban grids were linked to provide backup power and improve
stability.
They were extended to connect progressively larger and more remote power generation facilities.
Today's electricity infrastructures link these formerly separate networks into national and
even supra-national power systems.
Moreover, these power systems are fed by an increasingly powerful and technologically
diverse array of generators delivering electricity for our daily needs.
Throughout most of the 20th century, the key tasks of electricity generation, transmission,
distribution and supply were concentrated within a single organization per country.
A so-called vertically integrated utility.
In many countries this single organization was a public monopoly.
In the case of a private monopoly, it was for certain heavily regulated by the government
to safeguard affordability, availability, safety and other public values.
In recent decades, however, processes of infrastructure reform have induced so-called vertical unbundling
of the electricity value chain.
In many countries, power generation has largely been privatized and now takes place in a competitive
market.
Similarly, energy wholesale and even energy retail markets have in many countries been
opened up to competition.
With these markets, new players have entered the scene, such as market operators, traders
and brokers.
In between power generation and supply to end-users is the transport over grids.
These grids are still owned, operated and planned by monopolistic system operators.
They are known as TSOs - transmission system operators -
and DSOs - distribution system operators.
￼Why is there no competition between electricity grids?
This is because the grid is a natural monopoly.
The existing infrastructure network was established over many decades
and represents a massive capital cost.
The cost of building a competing grid is simply too high.
This is the case for many infrastructure networks, however...
New technologies may change that picture.
In the world of information and telecommunication services, for example, we have seen competing
networks come up over the past two decades, both fixed and wireless networks.
As you can see, the social system has become much more complex as a consequence of electricity
infrastructure reform.
Meanwhile, in the electricity infrastructure, new technologies are being introduced,
for example to farm wind and solar power.
The scale of power generation is also changing.
Many consumers of electricity have become producers at the same time.
Think of consumers' solar panels on their roofs or small scale units
for the cogeneration of heat and power in households.
Consumers have actually become prosumers of electricity.
These technological changes can endanger the stability of the grid.
To make sure that doesn't happen, operational practices need to be revised and
new rules need to be implemented.
This is just another example of how the social and the technical dimensions of the electricity
infrastructure are closely intertwined.
Infrastructures become even more fascinating if you realize that most of these systems
have slowly interconnected local, regional and national systems over several decades
or even centuries.
That implies that they were not designed as the integrated systems that we know today.
Rather than being designed as integrated systems, they evolved as integrated large-scale systems.
We do, however, expect them to function as integrated systems, offering adequate service
at all times, wherever we are.
The reality, unfortunately, is that we cannot take the availability of these services for
granted, as many people in developing and emerging economies know very well.
Women and children in sub-Saharan Africa spend many hours a day to get water and to collect
the firewood they need for cooking.
In a city like Bangalore, India, which is the heart of India's IT industry, planned
interruptions of drinking water and electrical power supply are common.
The city's infrastructures simply cannot keep up with the massive influx of new citizens
and the fast growth of the economy.
So we are still a long way from ensuring reliable water, energy and transportation services
for the whole world.
And, even when advanced infrastructure is available, we are struggling to adapt our
legacy systems to changing demands and preferences of individual users and their societies.
Local infrastructure failure may have mundane causes such as wear and tear, or digging contractors
that accidentally hit a pipeline or a cable.
Even the occasional power blackout ￼ may hit us right here, as a consequence of a failure
somewhere far away that cascades through the continental network.
And, to further complicate matters, failures may also originate from other infrastructure
systems.
Which is because today's infrastructure systems are largely interdependent.
For example, drinking water infrastructure needs electricity to power its pumps.
Continental electricity infrastructure needs telecom and information infrastructure.
Because without that essential information on the state of the network cannot be shared
between national Transmission System Operators.
Then mobile telecommunication infrastructure critically depends on electricity.
In other words, we are dealing with a system of interdependent infrastructure systems.
The socio-technical complexity of modern infrastructure is unprecedented, which is one of the reasons
why we refer to Next Generation Infrastructure.
The need to deal with that complexity is a given.
After all, how else are we to supply the next generation of the world population with essential
infrastructure services?
We will use the conceptual framework of Complex Adaptive Systems to capture the dynamics of
infrastructure systems.
These dynamics will become clear when looking at the operational time scales and the evolutionary
time scales of infrastructure systems.
Complex Adaptive Systems theory will help us understand how changes in interactions
between decision makers give rise to unpredictable and possibly undesired behavior of the system
as a whole.
For that reason we will introduce complexity theory, in week 2.
Eventually, we will show you how the development and services of infrastructures depend on
the decisions of many different actors in the system:
investors, owners, operators, regulators, policy makers and users; to name some of the
most important actors.
More importantly, we will show you how incentives and regulations shape those decisions.
You will learn to not underestimate the power you have, as a user, with millions of other
users, to change the pathways of infrastructure development.
Thank you for your attention.
The next web lecture is an animation, which will also help you to understand the complexity
of infrastructures.