Intelligent Infrastructures

Book excerpt: Society heavily depends on infrastructure systems, such as road-traffic networks, water networks, electricity networks, etc. Infrastructure systems are hereby considered to be large-scale, networked systems, that almost everybody uses on a daily basis, and that are so vital that their incapacity or destruction would have a debilitating impact on the defense or economic security and functioning of society. The operation and control of existing infrastructures such as road-traffic networks, water networks, electricity networks, etc. are failing: too often we are confronted with capacity problems, unsafety, unreliability and inefficiency. This book concentrates on a wide range of problems concerning the way infrastructures are functioning today and discuss novel advanced, intelligent, methods and tools for the operation and control of existing and future infrastructures.