Infrastructure can be defined as the basic physical and organizational structures needed for the operation of a society or enterprise. It is the services and facilities necessary for an economy to function. The term typically refers to the technical structures that support a society, such as roads, water supply, sewers, power grids, telecommunications, and so forth.
Viewed functionally, infrastructure facilitates the production of goods and services; for example, roads enable the transport of raw materials to a factory, and also for the distribution of finished products to markets. In some contexts, the term may also include basic social services such as schools and hospitals.
In military parlance, the term refers to the buildings and permanent installations necessary for the support, redeployment, and operation of military forces [Engineers generally limit the use of the term infrastructure to describe fixed assets that are in the form a large network. Recent efforts to devise more generic definitions of infrastructure have typically referred to the network aspects of most of the structures and to the accumulated value of investments in the networks as assets.
One such effort defines infrastructure as the network of assets "where the system as a whole is intended to be maintained indefinitely at a specified standard of service by the continuing replacement and refurbishment of its components." However, the principles that civil infrastructure is meant to have unlimited service life and always provide some specified minimum standard of service are neither inherent to the concept nor generally accepted by the societies served.
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