Engineering Systems Integration for Civil Infrastructure Projects

Abstract

Public infrastructure owners continue to explore a range of project delivery and financing strategies to meet current and future needs, including Design-Bid-Build, Design-Build, turnkey, Design-Build-Operate, Build-Operate-Transfer, and Build-Own-Operate-Transfer. In the midst of these activities, a new engineering discipline is emerging. This new discipline—“Engineering Systems Integration”—treats project delivery and finance methods as variables to be managed in the infrastructure development process, rather than as constants with respect to which engineers and planners have no input or control. The engineering systems integrator is engaged in the optimization of the project delivery and finance configuration at both project and system levels. Four years of research examined more than 3,000 infrastructure projects in the U.S. and Hong Kong and has produced an operational framework to model the robust environment in which Engineering Systems Integration occurs. This paper presents this framework, describes how it is being incorporated into engineering curricula at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and applies the framework to a major multimodal transportation facility at an EPA Superfund site north of Boston.