Sustainable manufacturing systems
(J Filar, V Gaitsgory and A Haurie)This project aims to develop a major, innovative and interdisciplinary, line of research under the generic heading of “Sustainable Manufacturing Systems”. Such a line would represent a synthesis of three, seemingly disparate, lines of investigations on:
- Effect of “singular” perturbations on solutions to operations research and optimisation problems
- Systems with multiple time scales
- Environmental Modeling
with the ultimate goal of shedding light on certain “big questions” of sustainable development in addition to progressing the understanding of each of these topics.
The goal is to attempt to connect the above environmental theme with operations research via an idea that an ecosystem such as a forest is “successful” (that is, sustainable) in the ecological sense because:
- it is a diverse dynamical system where the time scales of certain variables (life cycles of various species of flora and fauna) are in a sense optimally synchronised with the time scales of other variables (e.g., the decay of one type of plant becomes a food source for another) resulting in a system that is virtually free of waste, and
- it is a system that is robust under perturbations in the sense that it recovers from storms, flooding, fires etc.