Climate change, NetZero energy, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution are all game changers for infrastructure providers. Inadequate and ill-prepared infrastructure will increase the consequences of rapid urbanization, extreme weather events and digital disruption, driving up the costs to individuals, businesses, and society, reducing economic productivity and undermining the quality of life for people and plant. To build smarter, more sustainable, and resilient infrastructure, cities will need to reimage infrastructure services they provide, and arrange deeply interconnected technological, social and environmental systems to do so. Infrastructure 4.0 is comprised, not just of physical assets and digital twins, but an interconnected web of social, institutional, and ecological systems. New, complex forms of socio-technological systems are emerging that require a synthesis across traditional disciplines of engineering, information technology, environmental science, and policy. Leaders in smart, sustainable cities are embracing information and communication technologies and other means to meet the needs of populations without compromising future generations, envisioning new possibilities, and developing transformational roadmaps for a smarter, more sustainable and resilient future.

Michael A. Salvato serves as Vice President of Infrastructure Advisory Services at Mott MacDonald - a global engineering, management and development consultancy guiding clients through many of the planet’s most intricate challenges. His current responsibilities include managing the Aviation Digital Transformation Program for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. In 2018, he retired from the NY MTA as the Director and Program Executive for Enterprise Information and Asset Management with over 35 years of experience in infrastructure planning, engineering, construction, asset management, program management, economics, finance, and information systems. Michael is currently doing research on smart infrastructure with New York Academy of Sciences and am a member of the Board for Smart City New York. He was an advisor for Blueprint 2025, a National Infrastructure Plan, also, a research professor of urban infrastructure systems at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering where he helped set up the Center for Urban Science Progress program on Urban Systems and Informatics, the founding Chair of the Institute of Asset Management in the US and a member of the US delegation that produced the ISO 55000 standard for asset management.