Conceptual and computational insights from a holistic framework for infrastructure management

A holistic approach for engineering problems involving public infrastructure implies considering a series of actors and interactions that must not be neglected nor considered in isolation. This paper seeks to incorporate the relationship between public decision-makers and private providers into traditional technical problems, such as making decisions about maintenance and risk mitigation. Conceptual and computational aspects of such holistic approach are discussed with regards to two complementary approaches to incorporate the multi-party nature of the decision-making problem. First, a game theoretical approach is used to model a basic example of a private-public-partnership for infrastructure operation, where the use of incentives is discussed from the perspective of the public agent to influence the private agent´s behavior. Second, an optimization approach is used to evaluate the action of several stakeholders into the problem of executing maintenance on a simplified model of a transportation network. The current state of this research provides the framework and means to define a variety of (even adversarial) stakeholders and evaluate the strategies and outcomes that emerge from coupling different interests and decisions.