Our article The Role of Modeling in the Analysis and Design of Sustainable Systems, co-authored by Dominik Bork, Sergio España, Giancarlo Guizzardi, Henderik A. Proper, and Iris Reinhartz-Berger has been accepted for publication in the Communications of the Association for Information Systems (CAIS).
Preprint available.
Sustainability should become a key concern in the next generation of engineered systems. While this expectation is relatively straightforward, how to get there is less obvious. The multi-dimensional and intricate nature of sustainability poses challenges in designing sustainable systems and analyzing sustainability properties. Finding trade-offs between economic, environmental, societal, and technological aspects of sustainability is a wicked problem and calls for advanced modeling and simulation methods. In this paper, we report on a panel discussion at the 28th Working Conference on Exploring Modeling Methods for Systems Analysis and Development (EMMSAD) with four esteemed experts representing four perspectives on the role of modeling for sustainability – stakeholders, digitalization, degrowth and IT, and ethics. We report the key arguments of the panelists and distill critical challenges and research opportunities.