Sustainability means keeping an existing system operational and maintaining the ability to manufacture and field versions of the system that satisfy the original requirements. Sustainability also includes manufacturing and fielding revised versions of the system that satisfy evolving requirements, which often requires the replacement of technologies used in the original system with newer techno...

Ensuring the long-term usability of engineering informatics (EI) artifacts is a challenge, particularly for products with longer life cycles than the computing hardware and software used for their design and manufacture. Addressing this challenge requires characterizing the nature of EI, defining metrics for EI sustainability, and developing methods for long-term EI curation.

The next generation of process engineers will face a new set of challenges, with the need to devise new bioprocesses, with high selectivity for pharmaceutical manufacture, and for lower value chemicals manufacture based on renewable feedstocks. In this paper the current and predicted future roles of process system engineering and life cycle inventory and assessment in the design, development an...

36 AI MAGAZINE It might be thought that artificial intelligence techniques or other types of computational methods are irrelevant in countries with few technological resources. As just one example of the possibilities, however, take road traffic in cities. The chaotic and spectacular road congestion that is characteristic of developing-world cities is a microcosm of opportunities for applying A...

Concrete is a long-lasting and less energy consuming construction material than steel and Aluminum. However, the concrete industry is the single largest consumer of natural resources. Several places around the world are facing faster rates of depletion of the resources needed for the manufacturing of portland cement, mining of aggregates, and water for making concrete. Each one of these materia...

The purpose of design for sustainability, in a broad sense, is to reduce our negative impact on the environment, society, and the economy. To date, various approaches have been proposed to serve this purpose (1). These approaches commonly focus on the physical and technological qualities of sustainable products or services; for instance, reducing the amount of material used during manufacture, ...

Consider the problem of protecting endangered species by selecting patches of land to be used for conservation purposes. Typically, the availability of patches changes over time, and recommendations must be made dynamically. This is a challenging prototypical example of a sequential optimization problem under uncertainty in computational sustainability. Existing techniques do not scale to probl...

Through a Benin-Canada participatory research initiative which included both Benin and Canadian non-governmental organizations, a local capacity to produce and market bednets for the prevention of malaria was developed. The development process began following a community-based assessment of local needs and skills. All materials for the manufacture and distribution of the bednets were obtained l...

SUMMER 2014 31 Ecological processes that occur at global scales are among the most impressive natural phenomena on Earth; they link environments across the globe and capture the imagination of observers. For example, billions of North American birds, representing more than 400 species, migrate annually, often thousands of miles, frequently under the cover of darkness, between breeding and nonbr...