Towards next generation infrastructures: an introduction to the contributions in this issue

Infrastructures are vital to our economy and society. The papers in this special issue address the state of the art in research on infrastructures design, management, and operation. A number of interrelated themes that allow analysing and structuring the vast number of research projects and themes have been identified. These themes have been taken from a large research programme 'Next Generation Infrastructures' and they comprise: infrastructures as complex adaptive systems, public values, flexible infrastructures, critical infrastructures and intelligent infrastructures. This paper briefly describes the themes and gives pointers to what papers can be found in this issue.infrastructures; research programmes; complex systems; public values; flexibility; critical infrastructures; intelligent systems; next generation infrastructures