Enriching Socio-Technical Sustainability Intelligence through Sharing Autonomy

• Published in: Sustainability Vol. 15; no. 3; p. 2590
• Main Authors: Heininger, Richard, Jost, Thomas Ernst, Stary, Christian
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.02.2023
• Subjects: Consciousness; Design; Ecosystems; Environmental aspects; Environmental sustainability; Self awareness; Social aspects; Socio-technical systems; Stakeholders; Sustainability; Sustainable development; Germany
• ISSN: 2071-1050; 2071-1050
• DOI: 10.3390/su15032590

We suggest to extend scientific research on sustainability beyond its focus on interactions between natural and social systems to socio-technical systems and the ways in which those interactions affect the challenge of sustainability. In increasingly digitalized settings, socio-technical sustainability intelligence becomes critical for human-centered development of societies worldwide, including the achievement of future organizational success. Human-centered enablers, such as self-awareness, global perspective, and societal consciousness, lay foundation for reflective socio-technical practice in highly dynamic ecosystems that are increasingly backed by Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Socio-technical practice requires frameworks and architectures that support active stakeholder engagement throughout design and engineering. In this contribution, we propose sharing autonomy as inherent feature of sustainable socio-technical system development and operation. We introduce an architecture and mechanism for building and handling autonomy as part of socio-technical sustainability intelligence. We exemplify both with a system-relevant logistics use case to illustrate the enrichment of CPS-based socio-technical environments through active stakeholder participation.