Dr. Muhammad Umer

This volume contains the papers accepted to the Fourth International Symposium on Infrastructure Engineering in Developing Countries (IEDC-2013). IEDC-2013 is a Peer Reviewed symposium, organized by the Department of Urban and Infrastructure Engineering of NED University of Engineering and Technology along with Institution of Engineers Pakistan (IEP). The symposium involves renowned and qualified experts on multidisciplinary areas from all over the world for the exchange of their experience on concepts and practices of present-day scenarios of infrastructure issues especially in developing countries. All IEDC-2013 accepted papers will be available on-line in the conference proceedings published by Elsevier Science in the open-access Procedia Engineering Journal.

Three successful international symposia were organized as IEDC-2001, IEDC-2004 and IEDC-2010, which were found helpful to understand and mitigate urban infrastructure planning, design and management related issues in developing countries. IEDC-2013 is organized with aim to focus and discuss the issues of rising urbanization for sustainable economic growth in developing countries. We received approximately 50 manuscripts for review. Of those submissions, 29 papers were accepted using a thorough two-phase peer reviewing process by a technical committee consisting of 27 reviewers, including experts from around the world. In the call for papers, we specified 38 area keywords limped in 8 themes. Furthermore, to bring expertise and interesting research questions from related fields to IEDC-2013, we invited 3 keynote papers from renowned experts related to the conference themes.

Many people worked together in organizing IEDC-2013 and ensuring its success. All of them deserve a heartfelt appreciation for their relentless efforts. We would like to take this opportunity to offer deepest appreciation and thanks to all of the authors and members of technical committee that participated in IEDC-2013 as without which this could have not been possible. We recognize support extended by Institution of Engineers Pakistan (IEP) and Higher Education Commission (HEC) Pakistan, for providing necessary funds for arrangement of this successful event and publishing of the proceedings. The cooperation of IEP, Karachi Center management was highly appreciable throughout all the stages of this event.

Prof. Dr. Mir Shabbar Ali
Dr. Muhammad Adnan
Mr. Muhammad Umer

Guest Editors, IEDC-2013
December 2013