Engineering The Future: The Future Starts Now

One of the new catch phrases in our field is “Smart Infrastructure.” My gut response: if this is what we’re doing now, were we building “dumb infrastructure” for decades?

But seriously, we’re now looking at designing solutions that have many elements of AI and consider the asset’s lifecycle from the ground up. We’re regularly looking at the “cradle to grave” approach, from planning to design, construction, operations and ultimately decommissioning. As engineers, we look not at disparate elements, but rather how the system works together cohesively. That requires close collaboration with many other disciplines, including how to optimize solutions while providing cost-effective results. This leads to amazing solutions, but it does require owners to adopt a new mindset.

Data-Driven Decision Support

A case in point is the City of Fort Myers, Fla., which faces innumerable challenges due to aging infrastructure, migration and climate change—just to name a few. Despite these challenges, the city envisioned a future in which it proactively deploys solutions, and it engaged GHD to provide a powerful decision support system (DSS) that combines integrated water management principles with data science and AI. The design’s approach included teams with water, advisory and digital expertise to deploy a Dynamic Risk, Enterprise Asset Management System (DREAMS) framework, which is a data-driven DSS that helps the city maintain and improve water-related infrastructure to make informed decisions that help it use limited resources and funds. To achieve this, the advanced analytics team developed different modules that include smart asset management, dynamic hydraulic modeling, adaptive planning/capital improvement plans, financial planning and resiliency.

This entire premise of the Fort Myers project is based upon the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Future World Vision (FWV) project, which was developed in 2019 and is a comprehensive platform to anticipate, reimagine and prepare for expected environmental scenarios 10, 25 and 50 years into the future. Called the Mega City 2070 digital model, it helps engineers reimage the world and how we need to adapt as well as how to design, build, operate and maintain our infrastructure systems.

Whether it’s resilient cities, progressive megacities, dispersed settlements or disadvantaged communities, these scenarios are representations of the realm of possibility with guideposts to enable us to drive toward a sustainable world. FWV includes visualizations of these environments and virtual reality (VR) representations of how these scenarios might look—whether a true mega city or even a floating city.

Engineers Will Lead

Despite these future possibilities, we’re currently living in an environment in which technology is changing our relationship with infrastructure. Using data-driven, in-depth, scenario-planning analysis, FWV puts civil engineers in a position to lead not just today, but five decades into the future.

I see Mega City 2070 as an innovative tool for educators from K-12 institutions as well as advanced education programs for technicians, technologists and engineers. As of fall 2023, students at 58 global universities successfully completed undergraduate or graduate-level courses that used FWV as the basis of the course. As of mid-March 2024, 295 international faculty members have downloaded the tool, and four times the number of universities are using the platform from a year ago.

Because of the interactive elements of this VR world, practicing engineers can use it as a worldwide whiteboard to get insight from other engineers on specific solutions 50 years from now with the challenges presented in all infrastructure systems within the Mega City 2070 scenario. The next steps will be to develop four additional worlds: Rural City, Floating and Underwater City, Arctic City and Off Planet City. It’s an exciting project that continues to evolve and shape our future communities and industry.