Innovations for Sustainable and Resilient Societal-Scale Infrastructure Systems
Saurabh Amin
Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Infrastructure systems are essentially physical structures (facilities and networks), organizational setups and services that a society relies on for daily needs such as electricity, transportation, water, and food. Safe, reliable, and efficient infrastructure systems are crucial for advancing the socioeconomic development of any country. This is especially important for India as more than 40% of the country’s population is expected
to reside in urban areas by 2030 and the rate of urbanization in next several decades is projected to be much higher than in the developed countries. Today, many urban centers are already witnessing the stress from multi-fold increase in the demand for infrastructure and services but face severe limitations for capacity expansion and organizational restructuring. As a result, our streets get routinely congested, electricity supply is often unreliable, water and air quality are hard to maintain, waste spills into the environment, and prices of essential food items and medical supplies tend to be volatile. Addressing these systematic issues will require bold new innovations and a robust entrepreneurial ecosystem to support and implement government policies and programs on infrastructure.
The key question is: How can we sustainably develop our infrastructure systems to support the needs of steadily expanding urban centers while achieving overall socioeconomic growth for everyone and protecting the natural environment? Addressing this question is important as India is making major efforts to chart the future of its 1.4 billion people by making significant investments in non-fossil energy generation, high-
capacity transport corridors, domestic manufacturing in critical sectors, and massive construction projects for provisioning public services. The ways in which India’s infrastructure will grow in the coming decades will also have far reaching implications on the global energy trends and humanity’s efforts to meet ambitious emission reduction goals. Here, we argue that recent technological advances in sensing, communication, data analytics, and emerging platforms and services driven by Artificial intelligence (AI) can play a significant role in shaping how we use, operate, and manage our critical infrastructure systems and plan for a sustainable future.
In the last 15 years, AI has influenced just about every aspect of our lives, from enabling friendships and social connections, to AI-assisted route guidance, to sensing and controlling our energy grids, to digital platforms creating sharing economy for transport, housing, and food delivery, to using data-driven approaches to monitor infrastructure assets and repair them. Notably, all these capabilities were enabled by innovations in
sensing, control, communication, and data analytics. The ongoing digital transformation of transportation, energy, water, food, and other infrastructures will continue to shape the existing services and create new opportunities to make these systems “smarter” – that
is, more responsive to changes in supply and demand, more interactive for users, and easier to manage for operators. Below we highlight opportunities for innovation in two major sectors: transportation and energy.
Multimodal Transportation Systems
Our urban mobility in the last 15 years has been shaped by the widespread adoption of smartphones. This made personal navigation much easier, facilitated traffic congestion monitoring at-scale, and gave rise to ride-hailing services such as Uber, Ola Cabs, Savaari, etc. While travelers are well-connected and more informed via smartphone technology, much needs to be done to better operate and coordinate mobility solutions, utilize
available transportation capacity, and reduce traffic incidents and safety risks. Next-generation transportation systems and mobility solutions are primed for disruptive innovations in how we build and configure our infrastructure (road capacity, fueling stations, parking lots); how travelers receive information on traffic congestion and navigate through the transportation system (via apps for routing, ride-hailing, and carpooling); how public transportation is reshaped to provide multi-modal and micromobility options; how traffic signals are coordinated to reduce wait times at intersections; how electrified scooters, cars, trucks are deployed to achieve reduction emissions and costs; and how commercially available automation technologies are introduced to improve overall transportation efficiency while reducing safety risks.
Especially important in the context of mobility for Indian travelers is to decongest recurrent hotspots in busy corridors, provide equitable and safe access to transportation for marginalized socioeconomic groups, improve emergency response services, and efficiently manage heterogeneous mix of newly built and old infrastructure. Mobility tech startups can help address these challenges by leveraging communication and automation technologies to provide innovative services to plan, coordinate, and improve accessibility and overall travel experience. Such startups can also help in improving data sharing and coordination between transportation operators, urban planners, and government agencies.
Low-Carbon Energy Systems
Decarbonization of the energy sector is one of the major requirements for reducing global warming beyond the 1.5 °C threshold and mitigating and adapting to the negative impacts of climate change. Our main challenge is to reliably meet increasing energy demand while systematically reducing the environmental impact of energy generation infrastructure. In the last 10 years, electric power systems have witnessed sustained innovations in solar and wind renewable energy generation and energy storage technologies. Simultaneously, innovations in advanced communications, the industrial Internet-of-Things (IoT), AI, and data analytics have improved our ability to monitor and control the electric power grid and created new opportunities for integration of power generation from renewable sources
To address the unique and multi-dimensional challenges faced by emerging markets and developing sectors in India, we need innovations that can leverage fast-moving improvements in clean-energy technology. These innovations must advance our ability to sustainably meet growing energy demand while simultaneously electrifying and decarbonizing energy systems. Also important is to ensure that large unmet energy
needs of vulnerable and socio-economically marginalized communities are addressed in the face of disruptive effects of accelerating climate change.
Specific opportunities for innovation in the energy sector include: analytical and datadriven tools to facilitate climate-resilient energy system planning; development of comprehensive databases and information systems to characterize available energy resources and technologies; tools to reliably operate energy systems under large-scale integration of renewable energy generation; new economic models (pricing and other
incentive schemes) to manage demand in both residential and commercial sectors; and technologies to facilitate coordination of distributed energy generation, storage and demand management. India is making significant investments in renewable energy and has set ambitious emissions reduction targets, with the eventual goal of net-zero emissions by 2070. Few imperatives over the next few decades are more necessary than developing an innovation pipeline that can produce measurable impact across the whole energy supply chain.
Closing Thoughts
Fortunately, Indian youth is increasingly understanding the urgency of research-based innovation. Government agencies are receptive to impactful ideas and technologies.Startup and big corporates are interested to accelerate real-world transition in socially impactful areas. Universities and innovation hubs realize the urgency to take up projects at the interface of fundamental research and technology transition. The business case
for sustained investments in new technologies that support digital transformation of critical infrastructure sectors is becoming clear. And closer ties between private industry, nonprofits, policy makers, and infrastructure agencies are gradually developing. All-in-all, we can look forward to an exciting new era for infrastructure systems and services in India.
(The author can be reached at [email protected])