Engineering for Sustainability

Sustainability and sustainable development have become popular goals. They have also become wide-ranging terms that can be applied to any entity or enterprise on a local or a global scale for long time periods. As enterprises and systems become more complex and development a support costs increase, the question remains: how does one engineer an enterprise or a product for sustainability? Engineering for Sustainability provide common sense information for engineering, planning, and carrying out those tasks needed to sustain military products and services and, in turn, the entire enterprise.

This book tackles the problem from the top down, beginning with discussions on planning initiatives and implementing sustainable activities. It outlines a series of principles to help engineers design products and services to meet customer and societal needs with minimal impact on resources and the ecosystem. Using examples and case studies from the government, military, academia, and commercial enterprises, the authors provide a set of tools for long-term sustainability and explain how an entire enterprise can be engineered to sustain itself.

Achieving the high levels of sustainability needed in complex military and industrial systems is too often an elusive goal. Competing rules and regulations, conflicting goals and performance metrics, the desire to incorporate promising commercial off-the-shelf technologies, and the pressures of maintenance schedules contribute to this elusiveness. This book provides an analysis of and prescription for the strategies, principles, and technologies necessary to sustain the military and the systems it develops and uses. This can then be used to make any enterprise more efficient and cost effective in a changing environment.