Strategic Design Principles to Leverage Power and Water Infrastructure Decentralization for Private and Public Benefits

Decentralized technologies such as rooftop solar panels, battery storage, rainwater harvesting, and on-site wastewater treatment are transforming the way communities generate, store, and manage essential resources. As buildings increasingly become both consumers and producers (prosumers) of electricity and water services, traditional approaches for planning and operating centralized infrastructure systems face new technical, economic, and regulatory challenges. Well-designed pricing structures, incentives and regulations can encourage private investments that strengthen infrastructure performance and resilience, while poorly designed policies can increase costs, reduce reliability, or create unintended inequities. This award supports research that develops new modeling, simulation, and optimization methods to understand how decentralized technologies reshape water and power infrastructure systems and to design incentive mechanisms that balance private investment decisions with public infrastructure benefits. The resulting design principles will support utilities, regulators, and infrastructure planners as decentralized technologies become more widely adopted. The project will also provide interdisciplinary training for graduate and undergraduate students at the intersection of infrastructure engineering, systems engineering, economics, and public policy, while engaging practitioners through an external advisory board, professional workshops, and other community outreach activities. The research develops an integrated mathematical framework for analyzing decentralized infrastructure systems in which strategic interactions among utilities, regulators, consumers, and prosumers shape long-term infrastructure evolution. The framework combines game-theoretic analysis, agent-based modeling, and physics-based simulations to characterize the coupled strategic, behavioral, and physical dynamics governing technology adoption and infrastructure performance under alternative pricing structures, operational rules, and incentive mechanisms. The research derives generalizable design principles that identify the infrastructure characteristics and policy mechanisms most likely to promote reliable, efficient, and equitable decentralized infrastructure systems. Although motivated by water and power distribution networks, the resulting framework is broadly applicable to other infrastructure systems in which public and private resources interact and co-evolve. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.