TY - GEN
T1 - Convergent Anthropocene Systems
T2 - 17th Annual System of Systems Engineering Conference, SOSE 2022
AU - Farid, Amro M.
AU - Little, John C.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 IEEE.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - The greatest societal challenges are numerous, daunting, and seemingly unrelated, collectively spanning almost every discipline of science and engineering. Societies confronted with these complex challenges need to manage synergies and trade-offs across multiple systems, scales and levels of analysis. Unfortunately, if the goal is to overcome each of these challenges separately, we must embrace convergence as a means to merge disciplines, methodologies, and technologies, and we must do this for every one of the challenges, which is a truly daunting, and perhaps even impossible, task. Fortunately, however, societal challenges of the Anthropocene share the abstract common characteristics of broad scope, complex interdependencies, and multi-faceted causality, and also share several common systems. Seizing on this conceptual opportunity, we evaluate the 'convergence potential' for systems-of-systems engineering methods. We then present a way forward that addresses the unique characteristics of Anthropocene systems by developing an agile systems-of-systems engineering framework and associated decision-support system to integrate fragmented data and disciplinary knowledge into a new systemic understanding. The proposed framework provides a fresh perspective on an entire family of societal challenges of the Anthropocene.
AB - The greatest societal challenges are numerous, daunting, and seemingly unrelated, collectively spanning almost every discipline of science and engineering. Societies confronted with these complex challenges need to manage synergies and trade-offs across multiple systems, scales and levels of analysis. Unfortunately, if the goal is to overcome each of these challenges separately, we must embrace convergence as a means to merge disciplines, methodologies, and technologies, and we must do this for every one of the challenges, which is a truly daunting, and perhaps even impossible, task. Fortunately, however, societal challenges of the Anthropocene share the abstract common characteristics of broad scope, complex interdependencies, and multi-faceted causality, and also share several common systems. Seizing on this conceptual opportunity, we evaluate the 'convergence potential' for systems-of-systems engineering methods. We then present a way forward that addresses the unique characteristics of Anthropocene systems by developing an agile systems-of-systems engineering framework and associated decision-support system to integrate fragmented data and disciplinary knowledge into a new systemic understanding. The proposed framework provides a fresh perspective on an entire family of societal challenges of the Anthropocene.
KW - Anthropocene systems
KW - Earth systems
KW - decision support systems
KW - engineering systems
KW - system of systems
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85135111983&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85135111983&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/SOSE55472.2022.9812683
DO - 10.1109/SOSE55472.2022.9812683
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85135111983
T3 - 2022 17th Annual System of Systems Engineering Conference, SOSE 2022
SP - 396
EP - 401
BT - 2022 17th Annual System of Systems Engineering Conference, SOSE 2022
Y2 - 7 June 2022 through 11 June 2022
ER -