Sustainability and the robust delivery of resources

Abstract

Sustainability as a concept has multiple disparate perspectives stemming from different related disciplines which either maintain ambiguous interpretations or concentrate on metrics pertaining to single aspects of a system. An ecological information-based approach is a holistic measurement which examines the robustness of flows as an important aspect of sustainability. This paper evaluates this approach by applying it to four economic resource trade flow networks. From the perspective of biomimicry, it appears that these networks can achieve higher levels of efficiency without weakening their robustness to resource delivery. © 2014 WIT Press.