Important announcement

Dear visitor,

Please note that this OpenCourseWare platform will be replaced at the end of 2026 by a new platform (under the same url ocw.tudelft.nl).

Courses and their contents that are currently available the platform will partly be migrated. URL’s for this content will change and content might be unavailable for some time. In addition, some courses will not be available anymore.

If you are linking to specific courses on this platform (for instance for your students), please take timely measures to avoid problems with access. Possible actions are:

  • Download the materials to your local platform (laptop, server)
  • For educators only (including TU Delft lecturers): Contact us at ocw@tudelft.nl and inform us what course you are using in what context (institute, program, period of use, number of students). We will research (in collaboration with the authors of the course) and decide if we will migrate the course, and if yes, can supply you with a new url.

Thank you.

Explaining the socio-technical complexity of infra-systems

Course subject(s) Module 1: Complexity of Infrastructure

In this unit, we will explain the complexity of infrastructures and will challenge the traditional engineering perspective on infrastructures!
We will further explain why their behavior is often very difficult to understand and predict, and why we should consider them as complex systems.

This complexity lies in both the physical/technical and the social dimension, this is why we speak of socio-technical complexity. To mark the difference between this new perspective and traditional perspective we speak about infra-systems or infrastructural systems instead of infrastructures.

Creative Commons License
Next Generation Infrastructures by TU Delft OpenCourseWare is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://ocw.tudelft.nl/courses/next-generation-infrastructures/.
Back to top
[sg_popup id=6]