Sustainability assessment is being increasingly viewed as an important tool to aid in the shift towards sustainability. However, this is a new and evolving concept and there remain very few examples of effective sustainability assessment processes implemented anywhere in the world. Sustainability assessment is often described as a process by which the implications of an initiative on sustainability are evaluated, where the initiative can be a proposed or existing policy, plan, programme, project, piece of legislation, or a current practice or activity. However, this generic definition covers a broad range of different processes, many of which have been described in the literature as 'sustainability assessment'. This article seeks to provide some clarification by reflecting on the different approaches described in the literature as being forms of sustainability assessment, and evaluating them in terms of their potential contributions to sustainability. Many of these are actually examples of 'integrated assessment', derived from environmental impact assessment (EIA) and strategic environmental assessment (SEA), but which have been extended to incorporate social and economic considerations as well as environmental ones, reflecting a 'triple bottom line' (TBL) approach to sustainability. These integrated assessment processes typically either seek to minimise 'unsustainability', or to achieve TBL objectives. Both aims may, or may not, result in sustainable practice. We present an alternative conception of sustainability assessment, with the more ambitious aim of seeking to determine whether or not an initiative is actually sustainable. We term such processes 'assessment for sustainability'. 'Assessment for sustainability' firstly requires that the concept of sustainability be well-defined. The article compares TBL approaches and principles-based approaches to developing such sustainability criteria, concluding that the latter are more appropriate, since they avoid many of the inherent limitations of the triple-bottom-line as a conception of sustainability.

Conceptualising sustainability assessment

Existing approaches to sustainability assessment are typically characterized as being either “top–down” or “bottom–up.” While top–down approaches are commonly adopted by businesses, bottom–up approaches are more often adopted by civil society organizations and communities. Top–down approaches clearly favor standardization and commensurability between other sustainability assessment efforts, to the potential exclusion of issues that really matter on the ground. Conversely, bottom–up approaches enable sustainability initiatives to speak directly to the concerns and issues of communities, but lack a basis for comparability. While there are clearly contexts in which one approach can be favored over another, it is equally desirable to develop mechanisms that mediate between both. In this paper, we outline a methodology for framing sustainability assessment and developing indicator sets that aim to bridge these two approaches. The methodology incorporates common components of bottom–up assessment: constituency-based engagement processes and opportunity to identify critical issues and indicators. At the same time, it uses the idea of a “knowledge base,” to help with the selection of standardized, top–down indicators. We briefly describe two projects where the aspects of the methodology have been trialed with urban governments and communities, and then present the methodology in full, with an accompanying description of a supporting software system.

Reframing social sustainability reporting: towards an engaged approach

Technological advances have made possible industrial and commercial applications of artificial intelligence, virtual reality and highly integrated manufacturing systems. It has also freed business activity from a focus on place, as both work activities and markets have been able to harness information and communication technologies in order to operate remotely. As a result, researchers have highlighted a phenomenon of ‘smart’ working. Some have pointed to a fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0) in which ‘smart’ factories use robotics to achieve high performance. There is now a suggestion of progress towards Industry 5.0, in which technological and social systems work in harmony to deliver personalised mass customization of products and services. This paper examines these developments from the perspective of unique, individual understandings of work roles and sustainability, posing the questions ‘Smart’ from whose point of view? Do smart systems promote sustainable organizations? How should design of smart systems be approached? It suggests that contemporary socio-technical systems approaches to organizational analysis are the best way to support harnessing of smart technologies in organizations.

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Socio-Technical Perspectives on Smart Working: Creating Meaningful and Sustainable Systems

This report sums up a literature survey of meta-analytical methods. The objective of the survey is to cover the state-of-the-art in three areas of meta-analysis where we believe there are still unsolved problems and where the choice of approach may still be contentious. These areas are the treatment of heterogeneity, the problem of publication bias and the assessment and incorporation of the quality of the individual studies.

A literature survey

Sustainability is often conceived of as an attempt to balance competing economic, environmental and social priorities. Over the course of three decades of scholarship, however, the meaning and appropriate application of the ‘social pillar’ continues to inspire confusion. In this paper, we posit that the inherent challenge of understanding social sustainability is its many legitimate meanings plus a lack of interdisciplinary scholarship. We draw from literature in multiple disciplines to illustrate five different ways that the concept of social sustainability has been applied in scholarship and professional practice, and highlighting the importance of applications that acknowledge placed-based, process-oriented perspectives that understand social, economic, and environmental imperatives as integrated concepts. Ironically, this framing forecloses on social sustainability as an entity distinct from environmental and economic sustainability. We believe that organizing the conversation around these five applications can help advocates of sustainability use the concept of social sustainability in clear and powerful ways while avoiding applications that relegate the social dimensions of sustainability to an afterthought.

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/8/9/878/pdf

Five Approaches to Social Sustainability and an Integrated Way Forward

Agent-based simulations are an increasingly popular means of exploring and understanding complex social systems. In order to be useful, these simulations must capture a range of aspects of the modeled situation, each possibly requiring distinct expertise. Moreover, different paradigms may be useful in modelling, ranging from those that use many lightweight reactive agents, to those that use cognitive agents, to those that focus on agent teams and organisational structures. There is need for an architecture which supports the development of a large simulation, through the integration of separately developed modules. This paper describes a framework and architecture which facilitates the integration of multiple agent-based simulations into a single global simulation. This architecture naturally supports distributed simulation and incremental development, which are ways of addressing the computational and conceptual complexity of such systems. In this paper we focus particularly on how to ensure proper management of simulation data that is affected by agents in different modules, at the same logical time. We also provide some preliminary performance evaluation addressing scalability, as well as a comparison of how other available systems handle the issue of shared data.

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An architecture for modular distributed simulation with agent-based models

Agent Based modeling (ABM) platforms such as Repast and its predecessors are popular for developing simulations to understand complex phenomenon and interactions. Such simulations are increasingly used as support tools for policy and planning. This work takes a Belief Desire Intention (BDI) agent platform and embeds it into Repast, to support more powerful modeling of human behavior. We describe the issues faced in integrating the two paradigms, and how we addressed these issues to leverage the relevant advantages of the two approaches for real world applications.

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Integrating BDI reasoning into agent based modeling and simulation

Computer simulation is a powerful technology which could be used by the emergency management sector to improve an understanding of complex scenarios. We present two emerging simulation technologies, Agent Based Modelling and Modular simulation development, and describe how they could aid with communication, collaboration and understanding of complex emergency management scenarios.

Using modular simulation and agent based modelling to explore emergency management scenarios

We provide a theoretical analysis of planning via Petri net unfolding, a novel technique for synthesising parallel plans. Parallel plans are generally valued for their execution flexibility, which manifests as alternative choices for the ordering of operators and potentially faster plan executions. Being a relatively new approach, the flexibility properties of plans synthesised via unfolding, and even the concurrency semantics supported by this technique, are particularly unclear and only understood at an informal level. In this paper, we first formally characterise the concurrency semantics of planning via unfolding as a further restriction on the standard notion of independence. More importantly, we then prove that plans obtained using this approach are optimal deorderings and optimal reorderings in terms of the number of ordering constraints on operators and plan execution time, respectively. These results provide objective guarantees on the quality of plans obtained by the unfolding technique.

Sarah Hickmott

Papers

Reframing social sustainability reporting: towards an engaged approach

An architecture for modular distributed simulation with agent-based models

Integrating BDI reasoning into agent based modeling and simulation

Using modular simulation and agent based modelling to explore emergency management scenarios

Optimality properties of planning via Petri net unfolding: a formal analysis