Sustainable Environmental Management from a System of Systems Engineering Perspective

Hipel, Keith W.; Obeidi, Amer; Fang, Liping; Kilgour, D. Marc

doi:10.1002/9780470403501.ch18

Cited by 10 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 56 publications

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“…In fact, after the Second World War, water resources engineers were members of one of the first major disciplines outside of the military to readily adopt a systems approach to decision making (Hipel and Fang 2005;Hipel et al 2008aHipel et al , 2008bHipel et al , 2009. These pioneers in systems thinking long ago recognized that a reservoir was purposely designed and operated for supplying fresh water to serve multiple requirements of associated competing stakeholders in agriculture, industry, recreation, commerce, and residential water infrastructure.…”

Section: Systems Of Systems Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…The world, in which society and individual human beings survive and prosper, consists of complex highly interconnected systems of systems (SoS) (Sage and Cuppan 2001;Hipel and Fang 2005;Sage and Biemer 2007;Hipel et al 2008bHipel et al , 2009Jamshidi 2009). As depicted near the top of Figure 1, these SoS could be categorized according to natural, technological and societal SoS.…”

Section: Systems Of Systems Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An Introduction to the special issue on tackling challenging water resources problems in Canada: a systems approach

Hipel

Fang

Ouarda

et al. 2013

Canadian Water Resources Journal

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Section: Systems Of Systems Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: Systems Of Systems Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Introduction to the special issue on tackling challenging water resources problems in Canada: a systems approach

Hipel

Fang

Ouarda

et al. 2013

Canadian Water Resources Journal

Self Cite

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“…Historically, SoSE did not include the design of non-technological interrelationships that are inherent, for example, in complex adaptive human-nature-technology systems. Therefore, we built on the SoS definition of Hipel [27,28], and added a social and nature environmental perspective to the SoSE approach. We defined an environmental SoS as a complex adaptive human-nature-technology system that is usually governed by multiple subsystems and follows an overall SoS objective.…”

Section: System Of Systems Engineering and Natural Resources Managementmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2019

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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.

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“…Systems Engineering and environmental management [33][34][35][36]; Decision-making tools [37][38][39]; Mental models (e.g., [40])…”

Section: Examples For Se In An Environmental Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2019

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An increasing number of sustainable development strategies (SDS) is being developed for cities, municipalities and countries. The design of such strategies is inherently complex. This is a result from intricate relationships between different SDS on different levels, and a large number of requirements that need to be addressed in strategy implementation. A particular challenge is the integration of strategies across different governance levels (e.g., city, federal, and national levels). Methodologies are currently lacking to systematically design SDS which take the full complexity of the dependencies of the strategies into account. In this article, we propose a participatory requirements analyses approach to support strategy building across governance levels. Experience from systems engineering (SE) has shown, that requirements are the basis for designing systems or strategies. We elicit requirements by applying a participatory modeling approach with causal-loop diagrams in an individual interview setting. To illustrate our approach, we test the developed design approach and focus on the interdependencies between SDS at the city level (i.e., the cities of Berlin and Hamburg) and the German national SDS. The design process reveals critical factors which are needed for the overall success of the strategies. The resulting causal models reveal that despite coordination activities of the regional objectives with the national targets, trade-offs exist between the strategies regarding the underlying conditions for their implementation (e.g., national law, federal and state law). In addition, the level of detail of requirements for certain objectives at the national level and across sectors is too general. This hinders the emergence of system-wide co-benefits of possible solution strategies. Requirements analysis can highlight interdependencies, such as trade-offs and synergies, between strategies at multiple governance levels and, based upon this, can support a more coherent strategy design.

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Sustainable Environmental Management from a System of Systems Engineering Perspective

Cited by 10 publications

References 56 publications

An Introduction to the special issue on tackling challenging water resources problems in Canada: a systems approach

An Introduction to the special issue on tackling challenging water resources problems in Canada: a systems approach

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

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

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