简介: |
The quest for sustainability reflects a crucial paradigm shift in the 21st century: the transition from environmental management, to a holistic, multidimensional system design of various scales, to coming up with solutions for reducing radical resource use, while improving the health, equity, and quality of life for all stakeholders. However, sustainability is an extremely complex area of research and practice in terms of scope, contents, and spatial/temporal aspects. Sustainable development needs not only the evaluation of the status quo, but also prediction and strategic decision-making for the future. Thus, how to characterize, analyze, and design, and restructure industrial systems, from the process/product level all the way up to the industrial ecosystem, in the context of sustainability, is a new research frontier in engineering that needs much exploration.
In this presentation, the challenges and research frontiers in sustainability research will be discussed first. Then, a multiscale design for sustainability methodology will be introduced, which is developed by resorting to basic sustainability science, multiscale complex systems theory, uncertainty theory, and control theory. This methodology is capable of performing systematic system modeling, sustainability analysis, and multiscale decision making under uncertainty. The efficacy of the methodology will be demonstrated by case studies, ranging from nanomaterial design, to profitable pollution prevention in surface coating systems, to industrial-zone-based supply chain sustainability. Finally, future research opportunities, including the need for multi-disciplinary, international collaboration, will be explored. |
