Description

The authors believe this free of charge book/ Fundamentals of Infrastructure Management/ will expand the impact of the material and help improve the practice of infrastructure management. By ‘free of charge/' we mean that the material can be freely obtained/ but readers should devote time and effort to mastering the material. We have provided problem assignments for various chapters/ and we strongly urge readers to undertake the problems as a learning experience. This book grew out of a decade of co-teaching a course entitled ‘Infrastructure Management' at Carnegie Mellon University. Our teaching philosophy was to prepare students for work in the field of infrastructure management. We believe that infrastructure management is a professional endeavor and an attractive professional career. The book is co-authored by two accomplished engineers - each representing professional practice/ academic research and theoretical evaluation. Their collective strengths are presented throughout the text and serve to support both the practice of infrastructure management and a role for infrastructure management inquiry and search. Importantly/ both co-authors have academic research interests (and a number of research publications) on various topics of infrastructure management. That said/ the primary audience for this book is expected to be professionals intending to practice infrastructure management/ and only secondarily individuals who intend to pursue a career of research in the area. The text draws examples and discusses a wide variety of infrastructure systems/ including roadways/ telecommunications/ power generation/ buildings and systems of infrastructure. We have found that some common fundamentals of asset management/ analysis tools and informed decision-making are useful for a variety of such systems. Certainly/ many infrastructure managers encounter a variety of infrastructure types during their professional careers. Moreover/ due to the functional inter-dependencies of different infrastructure systems/ it is certainly advantageous for managers of one infrastructure type to understand other types of infrastructure. For example/ roadway managers rely upon the power grid for traffic signal operation.