Social infrastructure of Silver Economy: Literature review and Research agenda

The term Silver Economy encompasses a vast range of concepts and areas of interest related to both the challenges and opportunities that the ageing population represents. Social Infrastructure is a subset of the infrastructure sector and typically includes assets that accommodate social services and support networks. Housing and utilities with the added value of 850 billion EUR per year represent the highest share of European Silver economy. Investments in housing and age-friendly built environment should be made with the criterion to accommodate declining functional capacities of ageing residents. Their functional capacities are decreasing and require the development of specialised housing stock for independent living in a community. The structure of housing stock and the development of supply networks and services for older adults, including nursing and social care, do not follow the dynamics of population ageing. Based on the literature review we present the dynamics of publications for the most frequently discussed types of dwellings in connection with ‘older adults’ in the journals indexed by Web of Science (WoS). In this article, we present a literature review of specialized housing solutions and other dwellings for older adults and further research agenda to develop optimization and control theory models supporting optimal planning, operations and control of services for older adults based on ambient intelligence, some of them based also on the geographic information technology and model to measure and forecast the demand for specialized housing stock and services in ageing society for which even the documents of the European Commission state that has not been developed yet. Industrial engineering and production research has the potential to significantly improve the efficiency of supply networks for older adults and mitigate the rising expenditure for health care and long-term care in ageing societies.