Conceptual Models for Infrastructure Leadership

Abstract

In policy and aspirational documents both the American Society of Civil Engineers and the National Academy of Engineering have called for engineers of the 21st century to take a leading role in infrastructure discussions about and decisions. These discussions and decisions routinely involve stakeholders, constituencies, and organizations that are unfamiliar with traditional engineering modeling and analysis techniques; removing communication barriers is essential, but many find our engineering tools, methods, and explanations difficult to comprehend. Assuming a leadership role in these conversations requires engineers to adopt new conceptual models that enhance communication between people with dissimilar backgrounds and promote shared understanding. The West Point infrastructure models introduced in this paper provide engineers, decision makers, and members of society with a universal framework for understanding, visualizing, assessing, and describing complex infrastructure systems in a manner that facilitates communication, fosters participation in infrastructure decisions, and allows broad-based engagement with design processes. The Conceptual Model provides a basis for identifying, visualizing, and understanding the elements of an infrastructure, the functions they perform, and their relationships to each other. The Assessment Model consists of six prompts, which guide the formulation of focused assessment questions that consider the performance of systems and components, identified in the Conceptual Model, under both normal and adverse circumstances. The Resilience Model provides a framework for the design of resilient infrastructures that incorporates risk management, engineering design, emergency response, and rationally sequenced recovery. Conceptual models are essential tools for leaders seeking to effectively engage stakeholders in complex decision-making processes by building toward advancing a shared understanding; the models proposed in this paper are an effective tool in that role, and their adoption and use would facilitate deeper engagement by the public, and, ultimately, wiser societal decisions about infrastructure.