Designing for Resilience and Sustainability: An Integrated Systems Approach

Abstract

In a hyperconnected and turbulent world, resilience has become an essential business competency that strengthens risk management. Resilience is defined as the capacity for complex systems to survive, adapt, and grow in the face of turbulent change, including gradual stresses and sudden shocks. Modern resilience strategies can help enterprises to embrace change rather than clinging to historical practices. By designing both facilities and supply chain processes for increased flexibility, visibility, and agility, organizations can improve their resilience to unforeseen disruptions, thus contributing to profitability and shareholder value. Moreover, resilience often enhances long-term environmental and social sustainability, as in the case of “circular” economic systems that strive to eliminate waste.

Through collaboration with global manufacturing firms, a comprehensive protocol has emerged for design of resilient and sustainable systems, along with life cycle-based tools for quantifying the resulting benefits. These methods broaden the system boundary to account for the hidden role of ecosystem services in enterprise operations. For instance, network analysis was used to quantify the contribution of pollination services to economic performance, revealing the indirect dependencies of many industrial sectors on natural pollinators. In another application, climate change scenarios were used in an integrated modeling approach to enable climate-resilient design for two industrial processes—heat exchange and urea manufacturing.