Resilient Sustainability Assessment Framework from a Transdisciplinary System-of-Systems Perspective

Abstract

The vital role of extensive information exchange among stakeholders across diverse sectors and the interconnection of various scientific fields with nonhomogeneous technology readiness levels has created a new form of a complex engineering problem in the climate change era. Comprehensive sustainability assessment to enable the realization of needs requires transdisciplinary thinking to achieve systematic solutions that bridge the gap between multiple collaborative systems in a portfolio. Although the principal aim of dedicated sustainability regulations is to force companies to move toward sustainability development, general and non-engineered metrics that have not defined clear thresholds for evaluation have encountered severe challenges regarding implementation and economic viability. Therefore, adopting a transdisciplinary systems engineering approach can address multifaceted challenges like sustainability by overcoming collaboration barriers, and traditional disciplinary limits. This paper systematically reviews sustainability-dictated regulations from a transdisciplinary perspective. Different standards are compared, raised opportunities and challenges are discussed, and future remarks are highlighted. The sustainability problem is analyzed from a transdisciplinary systems engineering lens. Finally, a two-level resilient system sustainability assessment framework is proposed to effectively handle and enhance the resilience of companies’ sustainability development roadmaps by enabling decision makers to find robust and highly reliable solutions regarding sustainable system design. The impact of this research is to create a new insight into addressing climate change which not only assesses the current situation but also considers uncertainty sources that affect decision making for the future.