There have long been calls from industry for guidance in implementing strategies for sustainable development. The Circular Economy represents the most recent attempt to conceptualize the integration of economic activity and environmental wellbeing in a sustainable way. This set of ideas has been adopted by China as the basis of their economic development (included in both the 11th and the 12th ‘Five Year Plan’), escalating the concept in minds of western policymakers and NGOs. This paper traces the conceptualisations and origins of the Circular Economy, tracing its meanings, and exploring its antecedents in economics and ecology, and discusses how the Circular Economy has been operationalized in business and policy. The paper finds that while the Circular Economy places emphasis on the redesign of processes and cycling of materials, which may contribute to more sustainable business models, it also encapsulates tensions and limitations. These include an absence of the social dimension inherent in sustainable development that limits its ethical dimensions, and some unintended consequences. This leads us to propose a revised definition of the Circular Economy as “an economic model wherein planning, resourcing, procurement, production and reprocessing are designed and managed, as both process and output, to maximize ecosystem functioning and human well-being”.

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The Circular Economy: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of the Concept and Application in a Global Context

(1963). Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Technometrics: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 128-130.

Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

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Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation

The Quark and the Jaguar

Multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) have been widely used in real-world applications. However, most MOEAs based on Pareto-dominance handle many-objective problems (MaOPs) poorly due to a high proportion of incomparable and thus mutually nondominated solutions. Recently, a number of many-objective evolutionary algorithms (MaOEAs) have been proposed to deal with this scalability issue. In this article, a survey of MaOEAs is reported. According to the key ideas used, MaOEAs are categorized into seven classes: relaxed dominance based, diversity-based, aggregation-based, indicator-based, reference set based, preference-based, and dimensionality reduction approaches. Several future research directions in this field are also discussed.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2792984

Many-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms: A Survey

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are an essential element of an organization’s ability to monitor its strategic health, helping to ensure the strategic goals of the organization are achieved. However, KPI assessment and improvement is often an ad hoc and consultant-driven process rather than one undertaken using scientific principles. This paper outlines the development and subsequent deployment of a method for KPI assessment founded in scholarly literature and balancing practitioner concerns for ease of use. The proposed method draws heavily on organizational stakeholder involvement at varying levels throughout the KPI assessment process, improving current methods by introducing a mathematical foundation based on value-focused thinking. The proposed method allows stakeholders to evaluate the organization’s KPIs in an effort to determine organizational performance against predetermined KPI thresholds. The method is demonstrated on a case study and suggestions for future research are offered. Keyword — Key performance indicators, assessment, performance management, performance measurement, decision analysis

A Method for Key Performance Indicator Assessment in Manufacturing Organizations

Approaches for quantifying security system performance vary for different critical facilities, ranging from in-depth quantitative analyses to heuristics-based rules of thumb. Since there is no single accepted definition for what constitutes an effective security system for a critical facility and how best to design and analyse these systems, this technical note is a survey of potential metrics and methods for critical facility system effectiveness. Recommendations are made for which metric is best suited for critical facility system effectiveness and a new method is recommended for evaluating system effectiveness.

Examining metrics and methods for determining critical facility system effectiveness

Difficulty of social phenomena representation can be related to limitations of used modeling techniques. More flexibility and creativity to represent social phenomena (an adequate mix of model scope, resolution, and fidelity) is desirable. The representation of social phenomena with a combination of different methods seems intuitively appealing, but the usefulness of this approach is questionable. Current view on the justification of multi-method has limitations in social science context, because it lacks a human dimension. This paper explores the literature that pertains to mixing methods, and displays current reasoning behind the use of the multi-method approach. The perspective on mixing methods from empirical social science projected onto M&S domain exposes high-level purposes related to representation of social phenomena with mixed method approaches. Based on the reviewed literature and qualitative analysis, the general view of ingredients for inferring purposefulness of the multi-method approach in the context of social phenomena representation is proposed.

/pdf/exploration-of-purpose-for-multi-method-simulation-in-the-3abbmb18vk.pdf

Exploration of purpose for multi-method simulation in the context of social phenomena representation

https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1029&context=emse_fac_pubs

Accounting for Errors when using Systems Approaches

https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1026&context=emse_fac_pubs

Patrick T. Hester

Papers

A Method for Key Performance Indicator Assessment in Manufacturing Organizations

Examining metrics and methods for determining critical facility system effectiveness

Exploration of purpose for multi-method simulation in the context of social phenomena representation

Accounting for Errors when using Systems Approaches

Thinking Systemically About Complex Systems