ONLINE COURSE
Sustainable Infrastructure Systems:
Why enroll in this course?
Plan, design, and develop infrastructure that adapts to future uncertainties while ensuring sustainability in the face of evolving environmental and societal challenges.
Develop innovative solutions for the climate crisis by applying sustainable practices across diverse industries, including water, energy, transportation, agriculture, and public policy.
Gain competency in an ever-changing future with increasingly complex problems with systems theory.
Engage in two live sessions with MIT instructors, and up to eight live sessions with learning facilitators, industry experts, and peers.
Networking opportunities establish professional connections with industry experts and your cohort.
Access to rich supplementary resources provides additional materials and content for a more thorough educational journey.
Certificate
All the participants who successfully complete their program will receive an MIT Professional Education Certificate of Completion, as well as Continuing Education Units (CEUs)*
To obtain CEUs, complete the accreditation confirmation, which is available at the end of the course. CEUs are calculated for each course based on the number of learning hours.
*The Continuing Education Unit (CEU) is defined as 10 contact hours of ongoing learning to indicate the amount of time they have devoted to a non-credit/non-degree professional development program. To understand whether or not these CEUs may be applied toward professional certification, licensing requirements, or other required training or continuing education hours, please consult your training department or licensing authority directly.
Course outline
Become a change-maker in your industry: Conceptualize, analyze, and design sustainable technological systems for the public and private sectors. Take a systems theory approach to engineering adaptable, sustainable infrastructure systems for the better of your organization, posterity, and current society.
Defining Systems
Systems Boundary
Components and Interactions
Temporality
Case Study: Air Transportation as an Engineering System
Sustainability and sustainable development: terminology and definitions
Assessment Method: LCA
Assessment method: Inclusive Wealth
Equity and Infrastructure: Emerging Methods for Planning and Evaluation
Multi-criteria Decision Analysis
Additive Weighting with MCDA
Benefit-Cost Analysis
Benefit-Cost Analysis Consideration
Advantages and Limitations of MCDA and BCA
Overview
Characterizing Uncertainties
Decision trees
Solving Decision Trees
Uncertainties in designing system capacity
Mapping cause and effect to understand dynamic behavior
Examples of CLDs
Good Practices for Creating CLDs
Stocks and Flows
Vensim Example on DDT
Quantitative Targets
Figures of Merit (FOM)
Attributional and Consequential Accounting Methods
Additionality
Case Study: Remote Sensors
Overview
Case Study: Infrastructure Planning Under Scarcity and Uncertainty
Technological Path Dependence
Case 1: Sustainable urban infrastructure design for new regions
Mapping dependencies between design of buildings, transportation, water, energy, and waste infrastructure in new urban developments
Determining direct and in-direct connections between design variables
Identifying priority design variables for setting sustainability-related requirements
Case 2: Evaluating feasibility of urban waste-to-energy systems with GHG emissions accounting
Nexus of environment-energy-resource use; Waste resource recovery technologies and trend
Municipal waste “emergencies” in major cities
Waste to Energy Resource Recovery (WERA) framework
Case 3: Leveraging the Water-Energy-Food Nexus
Definition of nexus; key concepts of the nexus
Quantifying links in energy, water, and agriculture sector at national/country scales
Extracting insights for technical design, planning, and national policies
Case 4: Urban water-energy nexus
Quantifying end-use energy intensity in urban water systems
Building-level analytics for determining water-related energy use
Extracting insights for municipal development and policies
Who is this online course for?
C-suite executives and mid-to-senior-level managers looking to develop an understanding of the concepts and key definitions of systems theory and its relation to infrastructure development and engineering.
Policymakers and development agencies interested in gaining insights into sustainable infrastructure improvements and development to support economic growth while working toward targets such as the UN SDGs.
Consultants seeking to provide their clients with innovative and sustainable infrastructure solutions for business problems while demonstrating credibility and capability through a respected course.
Finance leaders and economists interested in the balance of macroeconomic principles and environmental, societal, and governance (ESG) criteria and investment.
Instructors
Research scientist, MIT and Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School
Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Engineering Systems, MIT
MIT Professional Education in Numbers
+60K
+155
92%
Frequently Asked Questions
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