NSF Workshop

 

The University of Florida in collaboration with University of Arizona is hosting an NSF workshop on Complex Interacting Systems for a Sustainable Future. The workshop will be held on June 7-8, 2007 at the Sand Key Beach Sheraton Hotel, Clearwater beach, Florida.

 

This two-day workshop will help to identify research opportunities directed at securing sustainable resources and ensuring economic sustainability for the U.S.

The world population, currently 6 billion, is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050. The corresponding rate of increase in energy consumption is expected to more than double the population growth rate as a significant fraction of the population increases their standard of living. In addition to the growing population, the 2002 United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development addressed major challenges including depletion of freshwater reserves and non-renewable energy sources, sustainable food production and security, scarcity of material resources including metals and other minerals, habitat loss and environmental impact, and their relation to social and economic development. Industrial sustainability[1]demands a global vision that systematically considers economic, social, and environmental sustainability.

The field of sustainability by necessity encompasses a wide range of disciplines. Indeed, a sustainable industry must consider the full life cycle of a product, the broadest impact of an industrial process on the environment, energy consumption, materials utilization, and human social context, and the connections between these products and processes. Thus a research opportunity in sustainability exists at the systems level, which is a core theme of the proposed workshop. The enabling capabilities include recent advances in solving complex problems (computational capacity, improved algorithms), the increased deployment of sensors and data collection to better determine constitutive equations and provide validation examples, and advances in models that more accurately describe components (e.g., ground water flow, integration of the human element). The opportunity now exists to better understand systems at a level of complexity that will be useful to make better decisions with a goal of sustainability. The opportunity exists to integrate the research advances in various fields at the component level to better understand and create more sustainable systems. The quantification of sustainability will also require the creation of national and global assessment models that account for economic as well as policy factors. This will necessarily involve understanding and integrating the research

 initiatives of multiple agencies.

 

The term sustainability has different meaning in different communities. All communities, however, understand the over arching goal of sustainability: sustain economic prosperity and a high quality of life for all while protecting the natural systems of the planet. A growing and diverse community of researchers is embracing this goal and attempting to integrate it into their own research fields. An even smaller community is envisioning collecting the systems that describe the natural resources, industrial processes, economic constraints, human interactions, policy as well as other systems to quantify the goal of sustainability.   This will require working with continuous, integer and binary variables, developing methods to perform integrated simulations, and incorporating uncertainty quantification. A view towards integrating the sustainability constraint into our quantitative models will require different data bases and sensors to generate the data, a new set of design heuristics, and connecting parallel consequences over long periods of time. The time has come to develop the engineering and science underpinnings of this field and to chart the research directions that will eventually allow its quantitative integration into all levels of decision making.

 1) Identify and communicate critical needs and research strategies for building the prerequisite scientific and engineering knowledge base for a complex interacting systems approach to sustainability.

2) Assess the current degree of understanding of complex systems, energy, water, materials, environmental, and human resource systems.

3)   Identify curricular and workforce needs to prepare engineers and scientists to practice and create sustainable products and processes.

4) Develop and prioritize goals and research strategies for the broader research community.

 

1. Core Theme: Sustainable systems integration and analysis
2. Sustainable energy recourses
3. Water Quality and Allocation 
4. Environment preservation
5. Materials assurance
6. Human resources and social factors

 

Explore research strategies and envision outcomes and their broader impact that will build a foundation for quantifying the emerging goal of sustainability and that are appropriate for the NSF and the NSF in collaboration with other federal agencies.

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