Convergent Anthropocene Systems: Towards an Agile, System-of-Systems Engineering Approach

The greatest societal challenges are numerous, daunting, and seemingly unrelated, collectively spanning almost every discipline of science and engineering. Societies confronted with these complex challenges need to manage synergies and trade-offs across multiple systems, scales and levels of analysis. Unfortunately, if the goal is to overcome each of these challenges separately, we must embrace convergence as a means to merge disciplines, methodologies, and technologies, and we must do this for every one of the challenges, which is a truly daunting, and perhaps even impossible, task. Fortunately, however, societal challenges of the Anthropocene share the abstract common characteristics of broad scope, complex interdependencies, and multi-faceted causality, and also share several common systems. Seizing on this conceptual opportunity, we evaluate the “convergence potential” for systems-of-systems engineering methods. We then present a way forward that addresses the unique characteristics of Anthropocene systems by developing an agile systems-of-systems engineering framework and associated decision-support system to integrate fragmented data and disciplinary knowledge into a new systemic understanding. The proposed framework provides a fresh perspective on an entire family of societal challenges of the Anthropocene.