Smart Engineering and Infrastructure Is A challenge

 Smart Engineering and Infrastructure Is A challenge

Engineering and Infrastructure is a professional engineering discipline that deals with the design, construction, and maintenance of the physical and naturally built environment, including works such as roads, bridges, canals, dams, airports, sewerage systems, pipelines, and railways. Civil engineering is traditionally broken into a number of sub-disciplines. It is considered the second-oldest engineering discipline after military engineering, and it is defined to distinguish non-military engineering from military engineering. Engineering and Infrastructure takes place in the public sector from municipal through to national governments, and in the private sector from individual homeowners through to international companies.

Engineering and Infrastructure has been an aspect of life since the beginnings of human existence. The earliest practice of civil engineering may have commenced between 4000 and 2000 when humans started to abandon existence, creating a need for the construction of shelter. During this time, transportation became increasingly important leading to the development of the wheel and sailing. Until modern times there was no clear distinction between civil engineering and architecture, and the term engineer and architect were mainly geographical variations referring to the same occupation, and often used interchangeably.

Smart Engineering and Infrastructure, or ‘self-monitoring and adjusting in real time

infrastructure, holds promises to solve many of the problems we are currently facing. Maintaining smart infrastructure may be improved by moving from scheduled maintenance schemes to predictive maintenance schemes. Therefore, smart infrastructure has the potential to reduce significantly the financial burden imposed on public budgets by the continuous maintenance and upgrading requirements of our infrastructure systems. Smart infrastructure also holds the promise to adjust automatically to environmental changes.  For example, being able to react to short-term usage peaks or long-term changes in infrastructure user-behavior allows the design and planning of agile infrastructure systems that are more responsive to the ever-changing requirements of our modern societies. Finally, smart infrastructure has enormous potential to increase the safety of our infrastructure by increasing possibilities to implement early warning systemsand fail-safe mechanisms.

First, sensors that can collect the required data about the real-time behaviour of the infrastructure system and its environment need to be designed and deployed. 

Second, advanced data fusion and analytical methods that can deal with the incoming big data from all the deployed sensor systems need to be developed. 

Third, decision-making methods that categories and predict different conditions of the infrastructure system according to the fused and analyzed data need to be implemented. 

Without a doubt, these three areas will be driving a lot of scientific research and entrepreneurial development in the years to come. Providing an outlet for these research and development results is one of the reasons for the ICE establishing the new journal of Smart Infrastructure and Construction