integration of the ideas of sustainability, systems engineering, and asset management
We have collectively arrived at a tipping point. Public concerns regarding a more sustainable world have produced a need for engineers of the future to have a broader and more holistic view of our national infrastructure. These three concerns - - designing, constructing, and managing highly complex public infrastructure in a resource constrained world of highly interconnected systems - - have collided head on into a world of limited fiscal resources. A new reality in which our desires to invest in the future run into our obligations to pay for the past. The tipping point should provide an appreciation that the future will not look like the past. How we look at public infrastructure systems in 2020 will be a far cry from the how associated with the view in 1980.
