Preface : sustainable urban and regional infrastructure development : technologies, applications and management

The concept of ‘sustainability’ has been pushed to the forefront of policy-making and politics as the world wakes up to the impacts of climate change and the effects of the modern urban lifestyle. Climate change has emerged to be one of the biggest challenges faced by our planet today, threatening both built and natural systems with long term consequences which may be irreversible. While there is a vast literature in the market on sustainable cities and urban development, there is currently none that bring together the vital issues of urban and regional development, and the planning, management and implementation of sustainable infrastructure. Large scale infrastructure plays an important part in modern society by not only promoting economic growth, but also by acting as a key indicator for it. More importantly, it supplies municipal/local amenity and services: water, electricity, social and communication facilities, waste removal, transport of people and goods, as well as numerous other services. For the most part, infrastructure has been built by teams lead by engineers who are more concerned about functionality than the concept of sustainability. However, it has been widely stated that current practices and lifestyle cannot continue if we are to leave a healthy living planet to not only the next generation, but also to the generations beyond. Therefore, in order to be sustainable, there are drastic measures that need to be taken. Current single purpose and design infrastructures that are open looped are not sustainable; they are too resource intensive, consume too much energy and support the consumption of natural resources at a rate that will exhaust their supply. Because of this, it is vital that modern society, policy-makers, developers, engineers and planners become pioneers in introducing and incorporating sustainable features into urban and regional infrastructure.

Ubiquitous eco cities : infrastructure, technology and management

Efficient and effective urban management systems for Ubiquitous Eco Cities require having intelligent and integrated management mechanisms. This integration includes bringing together economic, socio-cultural and urban development with a well orchestrated, transparent and open decision-making system and necessary infrastructure and technologies. In Ubiquitous Eco Cities telecommunication technologies play an important role in monitoring and managing activities via wired and wireless networks. Particularly, technology convergence creates new ways in which information and telecommunication technologies are used and formed the backbone of urban management. The 21st Century is an era where information has converged, in which people are able to access a variety of services, including internet and location based services, through multi-functional devices and provides new opportunities in the management of Ubiquitous Eco Cities. This chapter discusses developments in telecommunication infrastructure and trends in convergence technologies and their implications on the management of Ubiquitous Eco Cities.

Social infrastructure planning and sustainable community : example from south east Queensland, Australia

Social infrastructure and sustainable development represent two distinct but interlinked concepts bounded by a geographic location. For those involved in the planning of a residential development, the notion of social infrastructure is crucial to the building of a healthy community and sustainable environment. This is because social infrastructure is provided in response to the basic needs of communities and to enhance the quality of life, equity, stability and social well being. It also acts as the building block to the enhancement of human and social capital. While acknowledging the different levels of social infrastructure provision from neighbourhood, local, district and sub-regional levels, past evidence has shown that the provision at neighbourhood and local level and are affecting well-being of residents and the community sustainability. With intense physical development taking place in Australia's South East Queensland (SEQ) region, local councils are under immense pressure to provide adequate social and community facilities for their residents. This paper shows how participation-oriented, need-sensitive Integrated Social Infrastructure Planning Guideline is used to offer a solution for the efficient planning and provision of multi-level social infrastructure for the SEQ region. The paper points out to the successful implementation of the guideline for social infrastructure planning in multiple levels of spatial jurisdictions of Australia's fastest growing region.

Sustainability : driver for decision making in infrastructure

With the growing importance of sustainability assessment in the construction industry, many green building rating schemes have been adopted in the building sector of Australia. However, there is an abnormal delay in the similar adoption in the infrastructure sector. This prolonged delay in practice poses a challenge in mapping the project objectives with sustainability outcomes. Responding to the challenge of sustainable development in infrastructure, it is critical to create a set of decision indicators for sustainability in infrastructure, which to be used in conjunction with the emerging infrastructure sustainability assessment framework of the Australian Green Infrastructure Council. The various literature sources confirm the lack of correlation between sustainability and infrastructure. This theoretical missing link signifies the crucial validation of the interrelationship and interdependency in sustainability, decision making and infrastructure. This validation is vital for the development of decision indicators for sustainability in infrastructure. Admittedly, underpinned by the serious socio-environmental vulnerability, the traditional focus on economic emphasis in infrastructure development needs to be drifted towards the appropriate decisions for sustainability enhancing the positive social and environmental outcomes. Moreover, the research findings suggest sustainability being observed as powerful socio-political and influential socio-environmental driver in deciding the infrastructure needs and its development. These newly developed sustainability decision indicators create the impetus for change leading to sustainability in infrastructure by integrating the societal cares, environmental concerns into the holistic financial consideration. Radically, this development seeks to transform principles into actions for infrastructure sustainability. Lastly, the thesis concludes with knowledge contribution in five significant areas and future research opportunities. The consolidated research outcomes suggest that the development of decision indicators has demonstrated sustainability as a pivotal driver for decision making in infrastructure.

Contexts, hybrids and network governance : a comparison of three case-studies in infrastructure governance

While hybrid governance arrangements have been a major element of organisational architecture for some time, the contemporary operating environment has brought to the fore new conditions and expectations for the governance of entities that span conventional public sector departments, private firms and community organisations or groups. These conditions have resulted in a broader array of mixed governance configurations including Public Private Partnerships, alliances, and formal and informal collaborations. In some such arrangements, market based or ‘complete’ contractual relationships have been introduced to replace or supplement existing traditional ‘hierarchical’ and/or newer relational ‘network-oriented’ institutional associations. While there has been a greater reliance on collaborative or relational contracts as an underpinning institutional model, other modes of hierarchy and market may remain in operation. The success of these emergent hybrid forms has been mixed. There are examples of hybrids that have been well adopted, achieving the desired goals of efficiency, effectiveness and financial accountability; while others have experienced implementation problems which have undermined their results. This paper postulates that the cultural and institutional context within which hybrids operate may contribute to the implementation processes employed and the level of success attained. The paper explores hybrid arrangements through three cases of the use of inter-organisational arrangements in three different national contexts. Distilling the various elements of hybrids and the impact of institutional context will provide important insights for those charged with the responsibility for the formation and key infrastructure and public value development.

Strategies for appropriate technology and competitive performance in infrastructure construction

Earlier research developed theoretically-based aggregate metrics for technology strategy and used them to analyze California bridge construction firms (Hampson, 1993). Determinants of firm performance, including trend in contract awards, market share and contract awards per employee, were used as indicators for competitive performance. The results of this research were a series of refined theoretically-based measures for technology strategy and a demonstrated positive relationship between technology strategy and competitive performance within the bridge construction sector. This research showed that three technology strategy dimensions—competitive positioning, depth of technology strategy, and organizational fit— show very strong correlation with the competitive performance indicators of absolute growth in contract awards, and contract awards per employee. Both researchers and industry professionals need improved understanding of how technology affects results, and how to better target investments to improve competitive performance in particular industry sectors. This paper builds on the previous research findings by evaluating the strategic fit of firms' approach to technology with industry segment characteristics. It begins with a brief overview of the background regarding technology strategy. The major sections of the paper describe niches and firms in an example infrastructure construction market, analyze appropriate technology strategies, and describe managerial actions to implement these strategies and support the business objectives of the firm.

Public service broadcasting, creative industries and innovation infrastructure : the case of ABC's Pool

The proliferation of media services enabled by digital technologies poses a serious challenge to public service broadcasting rationales based on media scarcity. Looking to the past and future, we articulate an important role that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) might play in the digital age. We argue that historically the ABC has acted beyond its institutional broadcasting remit to facilitate cultural development and, drawing on the example of Pool (an online community of creative practitioners established and maintained by the ABC), point to a key role it might play in fostering network innovation in what are now conceptualised as the creative industries.

Capability for infrastructure asset capacity management

Infrastructure capacity management is the process of ensuring optimal provision of infrastructure assets to support business operations. Effectiveness in this process will enable infrastructure asset owners and its stakeholders to receive full value on their investment. Management research has shown that an organisation can only achieve business value when it has the right capabilities. This paradigm can also be applied to infrastructure capacity management. With competing needs for limited organisation resources, the challenge for infrastructure organisations is to identify and invest their limited resources to develop the right capabilities in the management of their infrastructure capacity. Using a multiple case study approach, the challenges faced in the management of infrastructure asset capacity and the approaches that can be adopted to overcome these challenges were explored. Conceptualising the approaches adopted by the case participants, the findings suggest that infrastructure organisations must strengthen their stakeholder connectivity capability in order to effectively manage the capacity of their infrastructure assets.

Developing the eclectic paradigm of internationalization on the issue of multinational contractors bidding for Australian infrastructure

Against a background of already thin markets in some sectors of major public sector infrastructure in Australia and the desire of the Australian federal government to leverage private finance, concerns about ensuring sufficient levels of competition are prompting federal government to seek new sources of in-bound foreign direct income - as part of attracting more foreign contractors and consortia to bid for Australian public sector major infrastructure. As a first step towards attracting greater overseas interest in the Australian public sector market infrastructure market, an improved understanding of the determinants of multinational contractors’ willingness to bid in this market is offered by Dunning’s eclectic paradigm and which have has been a dominant approach in international business for over 20 years and yet has been little used in the context of international contracting. This paper aims to develop Dunning’s eclectic framework and also gives a brief outline of a research plan to collect secondary data and primary data from international contractors around the globe in pursuance of testing the eclectic framework.

Submission to Victorian Parliamentary Committee on Economic Development and Infrastructure

In the networked information driven world that we now inhabit the ability to access and reuse information, data and culture is a key ingredient to social, economic and cultural innovation. As government holds enormous amounts of publicly funded material that can be released to the public without breaching the law it should move to implement policies that will allow better access to and reuse of that information, knowledge and culture. The Queensland Government Information Licensing Framework (GILF) Project4 is one of the first projects in the world to systemically approach this issue and should be consulted as a best practice model.

Wind uplift strength of trapezoidal steel cladding with closely spaced ribs

When crest-fixed thin trapezoidal steel cladding with closely spaced ribs is subjected to wind uplift/suction forces, local dimpling or pull-through failures occur prematurely at their screw connections because of the large stress concentrations in the cladding under the screw heads. Currently, the design of crest-fixed profiled steel cladding is mainly based on time consuming and expensive laboratory tests due to the lack of adequate design rules. In this research, a shell finite element model of crest-fixed trapezoidal steel cladding with closely spaced ribs was developed and validated using experimental results. The finite element model included a recently developed splitting criterion and other advanced features including geometric imperfections, buckling effects, contact modelling and hyperelastic behaviour of neoprene washers, and was used in a detailed parametric study to develop suitable design formulae for local failures. This paper presents the details of the finite element analyses, large scale experiments and their results including the new wind uplift design strength formulae for trapezoidal steel cladding with closely spaced ribs. The new design formulae can be used to achieve both safe and optimised solutions.

Developing a research method to test a new first-order decision making model for the procurement of public sector major infrastructure

Given global demand for new infrastructure, governments face substantial challenges in funding new infrastructure and simultaneously delivering Value for Money (VfM). The paper begins with an update on a key development in a new early/first-order procurement decision making model that deploys production cost/benefit theory and theories concerning transaction costs from the New Institutional Economics, in order to identify a procurement mode that is likely to deliver the best ratio of production costs and transaction costs to production benefits, and therefore deliver superior VfM relative to alternative procurement modes. In doing so, the new procurement model is also able to address the uncertainty concerning the relative merits of Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) and non-PPP procurement approaches. The main aim of the paper is to develop competition as a dependent variable/proxy for VfM and a hypothesis (overarching proposition), as well as developing a research method to test the new procurement model. Competition reflects both production costs and benefits (absolute level of competition) and transaction costs (level of realised competition) and is a key proxy for VfM. Using competition as a proxy for VfM, the overarching proposition is given as: When the actual procurement mode matches the predicted (theoretical) procurement mode (informed by the new procurement model), then actual competition is expected to match potential competition (based on actual capacity). To collect data to test this proposition, the research method that is developed in this paper combines a survey and case study approach. More specifically, data collection instruments for the surveys to collect data on actual procurement, actual competition and potential competition are outlined. Finally, plans for analysing this survey data are briefly mentioned, along with noting the planned use of analytical pattern matching in deploying the new procurement model and in order to develop the predicted (theoretical) procurement mode.

Path planning, guidance and control for a UAV forced landing

A forced landing is an unscheduled event in flight requiring an emergency landing, and is most commonly attributed to engine failure, failure of avionics or adverse weather. Since the ability to conduct a successful forced landing is the primary indicator for safety in the aviation industry, automating this capability for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) will help facilitate their integration into, and subsequent routine operations over civilian airspace. Currently, there is no commercial system available to perform this task; however, a team at the Australian Research Centre for Aerospace Automation (ARCAA) is working towards developing such an automated forced landing system. This system, codenamed Flight Guardian, will operate onboard the aircraft and use machine vision for site identification, artificial intelligence for data assessment and evaluation, and path planning, guidance and control techniques to actualize the landing. This thesis focuses on research specific to the third category, and presents the design, testing and evaluation of a Trajectory Generation and Guidance System (TGGS) that navigates the aircraft to land at a chosen site, following an engine failure. Firstly, two algorithms are developed that adapts manned aircraft forced landing techniques to suit the UAV planning problem. Algorithm 1 allows the UAV to select a route (from a library) based on a fixed glide range and the ambient wind conditions, while Algorithm 2 uses a series of adjustable waypoints to cater for changing winds. A comparison of both algorithms in over 200 simulated forced landings found that using Algorithm 2, twice as many landings were within the designated area, with an average lateral miss distance of 200 m at the aimpoint. These results present a baseline for further refinements to the planning algorithms. A significant contribution is seen in the design of the 3-D Dubins Curves planning algorithm, which extends the elementary concepts underlying 2-D Dubins paths to account for powerless flight in three dimensions. This has also resulted in the development of new methods in testing for path traversability, in losing excess altitude, and in the actual path formation to ensure aircraft stability. Simulations using this algorithm have demonstrated lateral and vertical miss distances of under 20 m at the approach point, in wind speeds of up to 9 m/s. This is greater than a tenfold improvement on Algorithm 2 and emulates the performance of manned, powered aircraft. The lateral guidance algorithm originally developed by Park, Deyst, and How (2007) is enhanced to include wind information in the guidance logic. A simple assumption is also made that reduces the complexity of the algorithm in following a circular path, yet without sacrificing performance. Finally, a specific method of supplying the correct turning direction is also used. Simulations have shown that this new algorithm, named the Enhanced Nonlinear Guidance (ENG) algorithm, performs much better in changing winds, with cross-track errors at the approach point within 2 m, compared to over 10 m using Park's algorithm. A fourth contribution is made in designing the Flight Path Following Guidance (FPFG) algorithm, which uses path angle calculations and the MacCready theory to determine the optimal speed to fly in winds. This algorithm also uses proportional integral- derivative (PID) gain schedules to finely tune the tracking accuracies, and has demonstrated in simulation vertical miss distances of under 2 m in changing winds. A fifth contribution is made in designing the Modified Proportional Navigation (MPN) algorithm, which uses principles from proportional navigation and the ENG algorithm, as well as methods specifically its own, to calculate the required pitch to fly. This algorithm is robust to wind changes, and is easily adaptable to any aircraft type. Tracking accuracies obtained with this algorithm are also comparable to those obtained using the FPFG algorithm. For all three preceding guidance algorithms, a novel method utilising the geometric and time relationship between aircraft and path is also employed to ensure that the aircraft is still able to track the desired path to completion in strong winds, while remaining stabilised. Finally, a derived contribution is made in modifying the 3-D Dubins Curves algorithm to suit helicopter flight dynamics. This modification allows a helicopter to autonomously track both stationary and moving targets in flight, and is highly advantageous for applications such as traffic surveillance, police pursuit, security or payload delivery. Each of these achievements serves to enhance the on-board autonomy and safety of a UAV, which in turn will help facilitate the integration of UAVs into civilian airspace for a wider appreciation of the good that they can provide. The automated UAV forced landing planning and guidance strategies presented in this thesis will allow the progression of this technology from the design and developmental stages, through to a prototype system that can demonstrate its effectiveness to the UAV research and operations community.

Removal of toxic arsenic and antimony from groundwater Spiro Tunnel Bulkhead in Park City Utah using colloidal iron hydroxide : comparison with reverse ssmosis

Verification testing of two model technologies in pilot scale to remove arsenic and antimony based on reverse osmosis and chemical coagulation/filtration systems was conducted in Spiro Tunnel Water Filtration Plant located in Park City, Utah, US. The source water was groundwater in abandoned silver mine, naturally contaminated by 60-80 ppb of arsenic and antimony below 10 ppb. This water represents one of the sources of drinking water for Park City and constitutes about 44% of the water supply. The failure to remove antimony efficiently by coagulation/filtration (only 4.4% removal rate) under design conditions is discussed in terms of the chemistry differences between Sb (III, V) and As (III, V). Removal of Sb(V) at pH > 7, using coagulation/filtration technology, requires much higher (50 to 80 times) concentration of iron (III) than As. The stronger adsorption of arsenate over a wider pH range can be explained by the fact that arsenic acid is tri-protic, whereas antimonic acid is monoprotic. This difference in properties of As(V) and Sb(V) makes antimony (V) more difficult to be efficiently removed in low concentrations of iron hydroxide and alkaline pH waters, especially in concentration of Sb < 10 ppb.