Strategic Infrastructure Planning Research Articles

An advanced spatial decision model for strategic placement of off-site hydrogen refueling stations in urban areas

The strategic placement of hydrogen refueling stations (HRSs) is crucial for the successful adoption of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs) and the promotion of sustainable urban transportation. However, existing spatial decision models using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) often stop at generating suitability maps and rely on simplistic or arbitrary site placement methods, such as fixed service radii, without optimizing spatial distribution that overlook inherent uncertainties, limiting the effectiveness of the decision-making process. This study develops an advanced spatial decision model to handle uncertainty and optimize HRS placement in Prague, Czechia. The model integrates multiple methodologies: (i) Utilizing 21 criteria across accessibility, environmental, infrastructural, and socioeconomic dimensions, with criteria weights prioritized using the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) to manage uncertainty in expert judgments. GIS suitability analysis identified optimal areas, with 18.13% of Prague classified as highly suitable for HRS deployment. (ii) Implementing Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) clustering to optimize site distribution and address uncertainty in HRS placement, proposing 10 optimal locations validated by a silhouette score of 0.68. (iii) Evaluating model performance through sensitivity analysis, revealing responsiveness to criteria variations. To evaluate and rank the proposed HRS locations, we integrated a Genetic Algorithm (GA) with the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), optimizing the selection process by exploring a wider solution space. Additionally, accessibility analysis assessed emergency response coverage, ensuring efficient response times. This multi-methodological framework ensures a robust, data-driven approach to site selection, optimizing accessibility, minimizing environmental impact, and promoting sustainable urban transportation. It advances strategic infrastructure planning, sets a precedent for integrating advanced analytic techniques to handle uncertainty and automate site selection in spatial decision-making, and is adaptable to diverse urban contexts.

چه‌مك و ڕە‌هه‌نده‌كانی ئاسایشی وزە لە ناوچە دەوڵەمەندەکان بە سەرچاوە سروشتیه‌كان (هه‌رێمی كوردستاندا به‌ نمونه)

The study aims to examine the concept of energy security and the analysis of its dimensions. It became clear that the concept of energy security is context- dependent. It depends fundamentally on the perspective of the importing and exporting countries. For the importing countries, the concept of energy security focuses on the availability and diversification of energy supplies at reasonable prices and without any interruption. But for the exporting countries, it focuses on ensuring the demand for energy at competitive prices to ensure stable income at the normal level and to protect the state from any shocks in the energy market. The Kurdistan Region began its understanding of energy security within the perspective of exporting countries. So its priority is to place itself on the global energy map and increase its oil exports. It attempts to achieve energy security through four dimensions - availability, affordability, accessibility and acceptability. While it has succeeded in achieving availability and accessibility (gaining access to foreign markets), it has not succeeded in achieving acceptability and affordability i.e. strengthening energy infrastructure. The conclusion of this study is that energy security in the Kurdistan region is vulnerable because of weak strategic infrastructure planning in the face of threats from regional and international actors.

Housing and the politics of Nationally Strategic Infrastructure Planning in England

The 2008 Planning Act introduced a new approach for determining large (‘nationally significant’) infrastructure projects in a new national process that would unify consent regimes and speed up decisions within fixed timescales outside of local planning. Major housing schemes have been excluded from this process, despite repeated attempts by recent UK governments to allocate more land for housebuilding through parallel reforms to the English planning system. This paper explores why Nationally Significant Infrastructure Planning (NSIP) has not been used for housing schemes, using the example of housing to reflect on debates about potential democratic deficits in the NSIP process and the selective politicisation of infrastructure planning in England. In doing so, the paper makes a distinctive contribution to practice and research by linking together debates about the politics of planning for housing in England and international literature on democratic process in the delivery of critical infrastructure.

Co-design and co-simulation for engineering systems: insights from the Sustainable Infrastructure Planning Game

Abstract This paper draws on perspectives from co-design as an integrative and collaborative design activity and co-simulation as a supporting information system to advance engineering design methods for problems of societal significance. Design and implementation of the Sustainable Infrastructure Planning Game provides a prototypical co-design artifact that leverages the High Level Architecture co-simulation standard. Three role players create a strategic infrastructure plan for agricultural, water and energy sectors to meet sustainability objectives for a growing and urbaninzing population in a fictional desert nation. An observational study conducts 15 co-design sessions to understand underlying dynamics between actors and how co-simulation capabilities influence design outcomes. Results characterize the dependencies and conflicts between player roles based on technical exchange of resource flows, identifying tension between agriculture and water roles based on water demands for irrigation. Analysis shows a correlation between data exchange, facilitated by synchronous co-simulation, and highly ranked achievement of joint sustainability outcomes. Conclusions reflect on the opportunities and challenges presented by co-simulation in co-design settings to address engineering systems problems.

Cultural Infrastructure and the Planning of Future Cities

Culture is an important aspect of human civilization. Preserving and giving value to the cultural heritage of a region can pave the way for local as well as regional development. This includes tangible, intangible and the natural heritage of cities. It is necessary to develop a cultural infrastructure plan along with other aspects such as transportation, built, green and grey in frastructure. Cultural infrastructure refers to places where culture is experienced, participated in or showcased in. This includes the existing cultural heritage of a place as well as the planning of spaces for cultural stimulation and involvement. With the advent of fourth industrial revolution smart cities are gradually becoming the way of life across the world. The Smart City uses Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Internet of Things (IoT) to effectively manage transportation, water services, waste disposal, energy and other community services. In this scenario it becomes imperative to have strategic infrastructure planning. Indian Government has recently launched the Smart City Mission in India and several smart city projects are underway across the country. It becomes necessar y in this context that Indian cities with their rich tradition and cultural heritage do not lose their unique identity in this process of transformation into smart cities. Even as smart city projects stress the need for heritage preservation there is a lot of ambiguity in how they can be integrated and used to advance urban intelligence. The technologies of the smart city have considerable potential to be used for the management and enhancement its cultural heritage and can help in the creation of a cultural infrastructure plan. This paper will examine the significance of cultural infrastructure in future cities and how it can be integrated into the city planning process of Indian cities through the study of relevant case studies from around the world.

Tackling the “New Normal”: A Resilience Assessment Method Applied to Real-World Urban Water Systems

The water sector is, currently and for the foreseeable future, challenged by rising levels of uncertainty in demand and availability of water, in a context of aging infrastructure and limited investment. In order to support strategic planning, water companies need a way to assess how their system behaves when faced with a range of changing conditions (climatic trends, asset deterioration, behavioral patterns, etc.) as well as accidents/incidents and/or extreme events (wildcards). In this study, a resilience assessment methodology was demonstrated, with ‘stress tests’ alternative water system configurations (including systems designed with decentralized or distributed philosophies) under a range of scenarios and extreme events. A ‘resilience profile graph’ was developed to quantify the performance of each configuration. The methodology was applied to the real-world urban water system of Oasen, which supplies the eastern part of the Province of South Holland, where the current system configuration and two potential future configurations were tested (one decentralized and one distributed). We show how the concept of resilience, operationalized through this methodology, can assist long term decision making and support strategic infrastructure planning.

Disruptions in strategic infrastructure planning – What do they mean for sustainable development?

The vision of sustainable development remains difficult to realize in practice. Processes of strategic planning for public infrastructure represent a major challenge, as, in many cases, they return unsustainable investment solutions. Research offers certain planning methodologies to improve the prospects of sustainable investments. However, very little is understood about how planning processes are undertaken in practice, and what problems in the procedural aspects of planning – termed “planning disruptions” in this paper – lead to deviations from the vision of sustainable development in infrastructure investments. This study scrutinizes the current scope of planning methodologies through the empirical case of a water supply augmentation in Melbourne, Australia. We derive a typology of planning disruptions which offers initial ingredients for a diagnostic tool to explore planning problems in the context of sustainable development. We also suggest making the current scope of planning methodologies more robust, by developing interventions that explicate and prepare for potential disruptions.

Preparing for disruptions: A diagnostic strategic planning intervention for sustainable development

Despite the emphasis on sustainable development in some of the contemporary planning and policy rhetoric, we face an implementation deficit in practice. The impediments to the widespread adoption and successful implementation of sustainable infrastructure in cities' critical sectors—such as water, energy or transport—are varied and complex. Although the scholarship has made some attempts to understand and categorize those impediments, not much has been said about how to identify them in a specific practical context. This study proposes a model for a diagnostic intervention in the ongoing process of strategic infrastructure planning, as a way of revealing context-specific impediments. The diagnostic intervention incorporates an explicit and reflexive consideration of short-term barriers and long-term disruptors into the strategic planning process, and assists with drafting the required coping strategies. The intervention has been tested in water infrastructure planning for one of the world's largest urban renewal areas in Melbourne, Australia. This trial application provided promising outcomes for addressing the implementation deficit of sustainable development: it created a platform for various stakeholder groups to engage in explicit discussions on their confronted problems, which often have trans-organizational causes and impacts; it enabled reflexivity within the ongoing planning process; and, it helped to consider a large portfolio of future uncertainties to provide an enabling condition for more robust decisions to be made. Moreover, the trialed intervention provided empirical evidence in support of the scholarly discourse which contends that sustainable infrastructure delivery is not only about the development of technical solutions, but is also about the development of processes and tools that support the widespread adoption and successful implementation of those solutions in the face of wide-ranging impediments.

The spatial exposure of the Chinese infrastructure system to flooding and drought hazards

Recent rapid urbanisation means that China has invested in an enormous amount of infrastructure, much of which is vulnerable to natural hazards. This paper investigates from a spatial perspective how the Chinese infrastructure system is exposed to flooding and drought hazards. Infrastructure exposure across three different sectors—energy, transport, and waste—is considered. With a database of 10,561 nodes and 2863 edges that make up the three infrastructure networks, we develop a methodology assigning the number of users to individual infrastructure assets and conduct hotspot analysis by applying the Kernel density estimator. We find that infrastructure assets in Anhui, Beijing, Guangdong, Hebei, Henan, Jiangsu, Liaoning, Shandong, Shanghai, Tianjin, Zhejiang—and their 66 cities—are exceptionally exposed to flooding, which affects sub-sectors including rail, aviation, shipping, electricity, and wastewater. The average number of infrastructure users who could be disrupted by the impacts of flooding on these sectors stands at 103 million. The most exposed sub-sectors are electricity and wastewater (20 and 14 % of the total, respectively). For drought hazard, we restrict our work to the electricity sub-sector, which is potentially exposed to water shortages at hydroelectric power plants and cooling water shortage at thermoelectric power plants, where the number of highly exposed users is 6 million. Spatially, we demonstrate that the southern border of Inner Mongolia, Shandong, Shanxi, Hebei, north Henan, Beijing, Tianjin, south-west of Jiangsu—and their 99 cities—are especially exposed. While further work is required to understand infrastructure’s sensitivity to hazard loading, the results already provide evidence to inform strategic infrastructure planning decisions.

Can We Plan Too Much? – The Case of the 2010 Metropolitan Strategy for Adelaide

With a Labor government in power in South Australia since 2002, a series of interlocking plans for the state have been developed of which the most important are the strategic plan for the state, the strategic infrastructure plan for the state and the metropolitan strategy for Greater Adelaide. The metropolitan strategy of 2010 reflected the ambitious population and employment targets of the state strategic plan and provided a liberal supply of residential land for urban expansion together with ambitions for a more compact city with higher densities. There are inconsistencies in these objectives which have not been resolved and reflect the optimistic forecasts of the state strategic plan and the nature of the metropolitan planning process with strong input from the development industry. Preliminary evidence is that the plan is not tracking as proposed and more attention needs to be paid to short‐ and medium‐term prospects, and community involvement particularly in strategic localities.

QUANTIFYING FREIGHT TRANSPORT VOLUMES IN DEVELOPING REGIONS: LESSONS LEARNT FROM SOUTH AFRICA'S EXPERIENCE DURING THE 20th CENTURY

ABSTRACT A number of attempts were made during the 20th century to develop national freight flow information for South Africa. This paper discusses these contributions and attempts to identify the major reasons why the research did not give rise to long-term strategic infrastructure planning. It is important to learn these lessons to avoid making the same mistakes during the critical large-scale infrastructure investments that are unfolding in the first half of the 21st century. The paper starts with an overview of the development of South Africa's surface freight transport infrastructure, and then provides a cross-country comparison of South Africa's key freight indicators. This serves to underscore the importance of a long-term approach to such infrastructure investment.

The exploratory analysis of trade-offs in strategic planning: Lessons from Regional Infrastructure Foresight

The sustainable transformation of infrastructure sectors represents a challenge of prime importance worldwide. Due to long life times of infrastructures, strategic decision making has to explicitly consider uncertainties in context conditions, value considerations and available technological alternatives. However currently, strategic infrastructure planning is often carried out in a very narrow perspective. The present paper argues that foresight informed strategic planning, allows addressing trade-offs related to context uncertainties, value conflicts and sustainability deficits in a structured way. The paper introduces a specific procedural proposal, the Regional Infrastructure Foresight method (RIF) and illustrates its potential virtues through an application to urban water management planning in a Swiss region (Kiesental).