Designing Resilient, Sustainable Systems

Abstract

Pursuit of sustainable development requires a systems approach to the design of industrial product and service systems. Although many business enterprises have adopted sustainability goals, the actual development of sustainable systems remains challenging because of the broad range of economic, environmental and social factors that need to be considered across the system life cycle. Traditional systems engineering practices try to anticipate and resist disruptions but may be vulnerable to unforeseen factors. An alternative is to design systems with inherent "resilience" bytaking advantage of fundamental properties such as diversity, efficiency, adaptability, and cohesion. Previous work on sustainable design has focused largely upon ecological efficiency improvements. For example, companies have found that reducing material and energy intensity and converting wastes into valuable secondary products creates value for shareholders as well as for society at large. To encourage broader systems thinking, a design protocol is presented that involves the following steps: identifying system function and boundaries, establishing requirements, selecting appropriate technologies, developing a system design, evaluating anticipated performance, and devising a practical means for system deployment. The approach encourages explicit consideration of resilience in both engineered systems and the larger systems in which they are embedded.

What we know and do not know about organizational resilience

“…As systems and organizations cannot be designed to anticipate all possible risks (Fiksel, 2003), we need resilient organizations to deal with events that will have serious consequences, even when they have low probability of occurrence (Ambulkar, Blackhurst, Grawe, 2015;Dalziell & Mcmanus, 2004). We also need to study when policies, procedures, practices, and tools fail during an emergency response (Kendra & Wachtendorf, 2003).…”

Structural sustainability appraisal in BIM

“…The time period of these impacts that fulfils sustainability considerations span from the present to the 'infinite' future as spelt out in the Brundtland Report [35]. This vast time span has imposed some complexity in the assessment of the sustainability of products [36]. Researchers have therefore suggested a life cycle approach [37] to tackling the associated challenges to avoid shifts and overlaps in the product system.…”

“…This is because the complex nature of building makes it require a holistic and integrated evaluation system [39]. It gets even more complex with requirements extending to the need to evaluate social and economic parameters [36]. This further exacerbates to the prolonged pursuit of the realization of a universally accepted sustainability assessment system.…”

A Proposal of Performance Indicators for Collaborative Business Ecosystems

“…The metrics shown in Table 2 to assess the resilience of a CBE were inspired by the four fundamental characteristics of resilient living ecosystems considered in [18]: Diversity, Efficiency, Adaptability, and Cohesion, and were tailored to business ecosystems. In fact, the resilience of the CBE can be calculated as a function of these factors, if each of them can be translated in terms of one or more quantified metrics.…”