Abstract: Roads have been part of our society ever since we started moving ourselves and goods around and are important for society’s mobility and economical progress. In recent years, we started talking about smart-roads, in which we often mean roads that give additionally functionalities such as charging support to electrical vehicles or vehicle placement guidance to autonomous vehicles. The potential effect of smart infrastructure could even be more extensive when we start including the perspective of the long-term performance of the road itself as part of traffic guidance and urban developments. As roads are traditionally government owned, have high start-up costs, are controlled by a segmented market and its stakeholders have very low profit margins, going successfully from the traditional road to a smart-road is not trivial. In the webinar I will highlight some of the major challenges and why treating our future infrastructure as a system-of-systems is needed for us to manage this change process.

Biography: Nicole (Niki) Kringos is Professor in Highway Engineering at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Director of the KTH Road2Science Center. With a background in structural mechanics, for many years Niki’s research focus has been on developing computational and multi-scale models to enable long term performance predictions of asphaltic roads. Through her work with the Road2Science Center, from 2012 her research has started developing views on how to address the complexity of innovation in the transportation infrastructure sector for sustainable integration of technical advances. Niki has received many research grants over the years, e.g  on Self Healing of Asphalt from the Swedish and Dutch National Research Councils, on Cyber-Physical Models for Cargo Ports from the Swedish Energy Agency, on the development of the Strategic Innovation Program InfraSweden2030 and the Campus2030 virtual twin project from Sweden’s Innovation Agency.

Connection details: Zoom is used for the webinar. The connection link is https://incose-org.zoom.us/j/93299906514. Attendance is free and there is no need to sigh up for the webinar!