Convergent Anthropocene systems – a system of systems approach

The greatest societal challenges of the Anthropocene are numerous and daunting, collectively spanning almost every discipline of science and engineering. Societies confronted with these challenges need to manage synergies and trade-offs across multiple systems, scales and levels of analysis. Unfortunately, most researchers tend to begin with their own subsystem and incrementally add a few interactions to a few other subsystems. Such incremental approaches ignore the dynamics of the larger systems and entirely overlook the fact that the societal challenges are interdependent. This fragmented approach is paralleled in policy circles. To overcome these challenges, we are inspired by system-of-systems approaches to integrate disparate forms of qualitative knowledge, quantitative data, and system models, choosing to use and further develop hetero-functional graph theory (HFGT). HFGT has been applied to numerous sociotechnical systems including electric power, water distribution, natural gas, oil, coal, hydrogen, transportation, manufacturing, and healthcare systems. HFGT has the ability to model an arbitrary number of systems of arbitrary size and topology connected to each other in an arbitrary manner. HFGT also distinguishes between physical and decision-making entities and explicitly admits centralized, hierarchical, decentralized, and collaborative decision-making structures conducive to the agent-based, sociocultural and sociotechnical phenomena that we find in convergent Anthropocene systems. To a natural or engineering scientist, HFGs are able to reconstitute the conservation laws of matter and energy for systems with explicitly heterogeneous resource-subjects, process-verbs, and operands. To social scientists, the linguistic roots of HFGs provide a straightforward means of traversing the often-formidable gap between qualitative knowledge and quantitative models. Finally, to applied mathematicians HFGT builds upon extensive foundations in graph theory and tensor analysis. In this presentation, we illustrate the potential of HFGT to bring together many disciplines within a single, system-of-systems computational framework.