CIEN E4137: Managing Civil Infrastructure Systems

Course Overview

Infrastructure managers serve primarily as key decision-makers. Beyond overseeing repairs and replacements, they are responsible for selecting appropriate technologies, allocating resources, and making capital investment decisions. To support effective decision-making, they rely on tools grounded in decision and management science. These approaches—significantly advanced over the past 25 years—offer structured, systematic methods for analyzing and resolving complex infrastructure challenges.

Throughout this course, we will examine these methods and techniques, and consider how they might improve infrastructure planning and management. This includes the unique institutional environment of infrastructure management, the role infrastructure plays in contemporary socioeconomic systems, and pertinent topics such as financing, performance assessment and management systems. To enroll in the course, you must be comfortable with the fundamentals of probability and engineering economics.

Course Instructor

Julius Chang

Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Construction Engineering and Management

A practicing academic and licensed professional engineer, , Dr Chang is currently a senior lecturer in civil engineering at Columbia University, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in construction engineering and management. He is also the NY/NJ Project Controls Lead for HDR, where he oversees a staff of project controls professionals providing services in the areas of cost estimating, scheduling, document control, risk management and data analytics. Recognized for his commitment to teaching and higher education, he is the recipient of the 2017 Columbia Engineering Alumni Association (CEAA) Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award.