ECS Intranet:
UK Infrastructure Transitions Research Consortium

The Infrastructure Transitions Research Consortium (ITRC) will deliver research, models and decision support tools to enable analysis and planning of a robust national infrastructure system. This research project is divided into several major challenges. University of Southampton is involved in the work stream entitled "Managing Infrastructure as a Complex Adaptive System". Starting with idealised simulations and working up to the national scale, we will develop new models of how infrastructure, society and the economy evolve in the long term. We will use the simulation models to demonstrate alternative long term futures for infrastructure provision and how they might be reached. These simulation models will be combined with the techniques of evolutionary economics to explore the dynamic relationship between infrastructure provision and structural change in the economy. A further avenue will apply approaches based on network dynamics to simulate the evolution of infrastructure networks through time under a variety of external drivers. We will synthesise the most promising approaches and test them to identify patterns of emergence and to understand how in the real world these new insights may be used to steer national infrastructure systems towards sustainable outcomes.

Funding

• EPSRC

Principal Investigators

• Prof Jim Hall
• sgb
• Prof Nick Jenkins
• Dr Nick Eyre
• Prof John Preston
• Prof Chris Kilsby
• Prof Tom Curtis
• Prof William Powrie
• Prof Cliff Jones
• Dr Stuart Barr
• Prof Robert Nicholls
• Prof Pete Tyler
• Prof Mark Birkin
• Dr Jim Watson