Requirements Based Design of Environmental System of Systems: Development and Application of a Nexus Design Framework

Abstract

Social, technological, and environmental systems have become increasingly interconnected. Integrated problems arising between embedded water, energy, and food systems, require political and strategic cooperation between the actors involved at multiple governance levels. A holistic design approach is needed to guide the inherent decision-making processes. In this article, we developed a normative decision-making framework based on System of Systems Engineering (SoSE) and demonstrated how it can help to foster the cross-sectoral design of solutions to these interlinked water, energy, and food issues. The actors involved in our case study demonstrated a strong interest in collaborating across sectors and participating in the transition to cross-sectoral and sustainable resource management practices. However, experts from science and practice face a high degree of uncertainty when they design solutions to cope with the existing regional problems. As almost all regions of the world are highly integrated in national and global markets, future research might consider conducting larger research projects that also link the design approaches to inter-regional, national, and international levels. Our methodological approach illustrates how such a project could be structured on a regional level and identifies the processes that are important to consider.

Integrated and Participatory Design of Sustainable Development Strategies on Multiple Governance Levels

“…A SoS can be defined as a collective system, which has autonomous and heterogeneous elements that are connected dynamically with each other and have their own goals which contribute to the overall goal of the whole system [27]. We already showed the potential of the SoS concept to contribute also to the integrative management of natural resource issues [19]. More precisely, it can be summarized that the SoS concept helps to "include multi-level complexity" into decision making processes, and "to gain an advanced understanding of complex relationships" in a system [19] (p. 17).…”

“…We already showed the potential of the SoS concept to contribute also to the integrative management of natural resource issues [19]. More precisely, it can be summarized that the SoS concept helps to "include multi-level complexity" into decision making processes, and "to gain an advanced understanding of complex relationships" in a system [19] (p. 17). The German SDS landscape, which is subject of discussion in this paper, is implemented on different governance levels, and represents a special SoS-type, an "acknowledged" SoS: The subsystems (i.e., urban SDS) follow a high-level objective (i.e., are aligned to the national SDS) which is often through the share of resources (i.e., share of institutions or multi-level actors).…”

“…which could challenge participatory modeling as a method, we use a System-of-Systems Engineering approach (SoSE) to frame the system in a more structured and process-oriented way. SoSE can contribute to the better understanding and inclusion of multi-level complexity into system design [19]. Originally, SoSE is a widely applied engineering approach which is mainly used in a technological context for complex adaptive system design such as software development, distributed systems management, airplane service design, infrastructural design (e.g., public bus networks), or military command and control systems [20][21][22].…”

“…This includes broadening the scope of requirements to environmental System-of-Systems (SoS), re-defining SoSE elements such as concept of operations (CONOPS) or requirement quality criteria, and defining new requirement types and integrating these elements into a participatory modeling framework. An example application of this methodology is provided in this paper by designing integrated and requirement-based solutions to existing problems in the energy domain in the SDS of the two largest German cities, Berlin and Hamburg, and their links to the German national strategy, whereas the conceptual foundation is explained in [19]. This underlying conceptual framework is called "FRESCO" (Functions, Requirements, Evaluation, Structures, Constraints, and Outputs) and "is a general process design framework for application on environmental SoS.…”

“…By following the process of the framework, the complexity of environmental SoS can be included into a system design task." [19] (p. 6).…”