ABSTRACT
There are currently many discussions around the need to design infrastructure systems that are more resilient and sustainable in the future, especially considering growing uncertainties from climate change, pandemics, geopolitical conflicts, and cyber/physical terrorism. It is widely recognized that infrastructure systems provide vital functions for society e.g., power generation, transportation, water management, and that they face much uncertainty and variability over their operating lifetime (+20 years). Yet, standard engineering methods provide limited guidance on how to best design such systems to make them more adaptable, evolvable, and reconfigurable to deal with future uncertainty and risks. The field of Flexibility in Engineering Design that emerged from the theory of real options provide systematic and innovative computational tools, algorithms, and digital processes to help designers and engineers better account for uncertainty and risks in early conceptual design activities. This paper provides an overview of the latest developments and future directions in this rapidly growing field. It discusses how flexibility provides the foundations for a unifying conceptual framework to create infrastructure systems that are both more sustainable and resilient. It introduces cutting edge techniques to support the design process based on principles from stochastic programming, robust optimization, deep reinforcement learning, and simulation games, including examples in energy and transportation systems.
