ABOUT US
The UK Infrastructure Transitions Research Consortium (ITRC) is a collaboration of seven universities and over 55 partners from infrastructure policy and practice.
ITRC’s research provides concepts, models and evidence to inform the analysis, planning and design of resilient national, regional and local infrastructures (NI) across the globe.
We investigate infrastructure and its interdependencies in energy, digital communications, solid waste, transport, waste water, water supply and infrastructure governance. We have developed the world’s first national infrastructure system-of-systems model, NISMOD, which has been used to analyse long-term investment strategies as well as risk and vulnerability in infrastructure networks nationally and globally.
Our purpose
ITRC-MISTRAL provides decision-makers with insights that hitherto have not been available to inform crucial questions.
- How will infrastructure systems perform in the context of major future changes like population growth, technological change and climate change?
- What would be the benefits of investing in new infrastructure capacity or of endeavouring to manage demand for infrastructure services?
- Where are the most vulnerable points in infrastructure networks?
- How much is it worth investing to reduce the risk of catastrophic failure?
Strategic objectives
We aim to change how strategic infrastructure planning, investment and design decisions are made.
- Our national infrastructure system analytics inform decisions by governments, utilities and regulators at a range of scales in the UK, and will be used in infrastructure planning and design around the world.
- Our national infrastructure database will become a shared national resource and a focal point for research and industrial collaboration
- We engage a wide range of stakeholders, including the general public, in understanding infrastructure performance and choices.
NISMOD: Long-term planning Models
We developed the world’s first national infrastructure system-of-systems model, NISMOD, which has been used to analyse long-term investment strategies as well as risk and vulnerability in infrastructure networks nationally and globally.
RISK AND RESILIENCE models
For the risk and resilience work, generally the models used are built from the ground-up for each project, we have developed a number of sound methodologies for conducting risk and vulnerability analysis over interdependent networks and published in major journals in the field.
FAST-TRACK combined long term & risk and resilience MODELLING
Together with the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS), we have developed a simplified framework tool which is used to explore how interventions over time can affect both resilience and the long-term planning aspects. The approach and methodology are highly portable and transferable.
The aim of the MISTRAL programme is to develop and demonstrate a highly integrated analytics capability to inform strategic infrastructure decision making across scales, from local to global.
Our vision is for infrastructure decisions to be guided by systems analysis. When this vision is realised, decision makers will have access to, and visualisation of, information that tells them how all infrastructure systems are performing.
They will be able to perform ‘what-if’ analysis of proposed investments and explore the effects of future uncertainties, such as population growth, new technologies and climate change.