Systems engineering approaches to sustainable environmental management

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The overarching objective of the proposed research is to develop systems engineering methodologies which can account for the conflicting value systems of stakeholders within an overall system of systems framework to informed decision making, for sustainably addressing pressing environmental problems lying at the interface of society, technology and the environment. An underlying motivating goal is to design theoretically sound systems engineering methodologies and to construct accompanying implementation algorithms to permit them to be operationalized as flexible decision support systems for tackling, often in real time, the strategic decision making aspects of major environmental problems facing society, such as water pollution, fresh water shortages, and global warming. The research can be conveniently subdivided into five interconnected components. The first part of the research is to identify how ideas from complex adaptive systems theory can be expanded in order to provide a stable platform for informed engineering decision making which is adaptive and integrative to account for real-time emergent properties of interacting systems of systems. The second component is the systematic study of value systems, which form the most crucial part of any type of decision model, since they dictate how decision makers individually behave and interact with others. Thirdly, research on the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution will permit the competitive and cooperative aspects of strategic decision making to be effectively addressed. Subsequent to determining potential strategic resolutions to a given environmental dispute, tactical Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) approaches to bargaining will be developed for carrying out detailed trade-offs among stakeholders to arrive at well-defined sustainable solutions to a specific problem. New MCDA approaches for the categorization of objects into predefined groups, such as the classification of regions according to the level of their vulnerability to climate change, will be investigated. Fifthly, the aforementioned systems engineering methodologies will be developed, tested and enhanced via real world applications in sustainable environmental management.