Engineering Systems Design Capabilities for a Resilient Green Transformation

Abstract

Early calls for environmental protection and sustainability centered on empathic arguments for curtailing consumerism and enacting personal and societal changes in our way of life. However we have now evolved to embrace a ‘technology fix' approach, where we aim to reconcile our need to maintain our standard of living with our sustainability goals by developing and deploying ‘green technologies' in our critical infrastructure at an unprecedented speed. While cost and sustainability are already in focus, the current discussion misses the third critical performance objective, resilience. In this paper, we explore how we can conceptualize resilience for critical socio-technical systems, and what the unresolved design challenges are to successfully develop and deploy them.