Sustainability and Interoperability: Two Facets of the Same Gold Medal

Abstract

To sustain is to endure' -that is, to be able to survive and continue to function in the face of significant changes. The commonly accepted concept of 'sustainability' currently encompasses three main pillars: environmental, social/ethical and economic. In a metaphor of survival, they can be seen as water, food and air; one needs all three, only with varying degrees of urgency. In today's globally networked environment, it is becoming obvious that one cannot achieve environmental, social or economic sustainability of any artefact (be it physical or virtual, e.g. enterprise, project, information system, policy, etc) without achieving ubiquitous ability of the artefact and its creators and users to exchange and understand shared information and if necessary perform processes on behalf of each other -capabilities that are usually defined as 'interoperability'. Thus, sustainability relies on interoperability, while, conversely, interoperability as an ongoing concern relies for its existence on all three main pillars of sustainability. This paper aims to test the hypothesis that interoperability and sustainability are two inseparable and inherently linked aspects of any universe of discourse. To achieve this, it applies the dualistic sustainability / interoperability viewpoint to a variety of areas (manufacturing, healthcare, information and communication technology and standardisation), analyses the results and synthesizes conclusions and guidelines for future work.

Requirements for Supporting Enterprise Interoperability in Dynamic Environments

“…Integrated systems exhibit less resilience than interoperable systems (see also above) [5]. This is of importance if a dynamic environment is assumed.…”

Learning for Sustainable Organisational Interoperability

“…It is important to differentiate between the integration and interoperability of systems as "integration is generally considered to go beyond mere interoperability to involve some degree of functional dependence" (Panetto, 2007, p. 731). This dependence implies less flexibility and less resilience since it combines the involved systems in order to form a single whole (Dassisti et al, 2013). In an integrated system the number of system parts and the probability of a part failing determines the overall probability of the whole system to fail.…”

“…Changes to system parts are less crucial as long as the interfaces defined for interaction between parts are not changed. For interoperability heterogeneous system parts are required (Dassisti et al, 2013). The concept of interoperability of systems is of importance for sustainable development, and is an ongoing concern for meeting the demands of sustainability of an overall system.…”

A Pluralistic Approach towards Sustainable Eco-Industrial Networking

“…Although still in full development, the SoS research can provide valuable viewpoints and methodologies towards EIN. For example, Maier (1998) progress in a cohesive and holistic way (Dassisti et al, 2013). Thus, sustainability can be tackled as a 'system of systems' providing an integrated view and approach towards the sustainable industrial development challenge.…”