Behnido Y. Calida

Regional industries as critical infrastructures: a tale of two modern cities

The research state-of-the-art mentions critical infrastructures (CI) in the same breath as studies about cataclysmic threats, events instantiated by a terrorist or cyber-attack, and/or a natural disaster. This paper suggests that a threat to CI may also result from slowly evolving, gradual, and undetectable events that build up over time. Entire regional industries and their associated networks exhibit punctuated equilibria-type phenomena. Embedded within regional economies and operating as a system-of-system (SoS), regional industries are CI that exhibit gradual evolutionary changes. This paper examines: a) the automotive industry and its impact to the City of Detroit, Michigan; b) the heavy defence/military-contractor industry in the Hampton Roads (Virginia). The paper concludes that a reorientation of CI research to include slow evolving events is necessary with calls for new investment in management, planning, and monitoring approaches that can deal with slow and evolving threat events.

Sustainability of systems of systems

The purpose of this paper is to synthesise multiple worldviews of system of systems and introduce sustainability as a prerequisite for the development of the field. Fundamentally, systems of systems provide significantly greater capability than constituent systems. The enhanced capability is achieved through coordination and integration of complex systems. This research fosters sustainability to support enhanced capabilities in systems of systems. First, we establish sustainability in the context of system of systems characterisations. Second, the system of systems problem landscape and challenges is discussed in relation to sustainability. Third, the need for sustainability is transposed to three diverging perspectives in systems of systems. Fourth, two industrial cases are used to illustrate the need for sustainability. Fifth, we introduce an organising construct within which systems of systems might be developed to address sustainability and viability. The paper concludes with implications and directions for further research for sustainability in system of systems.

System Governance: Emergence of Practical Perspectives Across the Disciplines

As the eventual concept of governance has yet to emerge, traditional sources of power and authority symbols will always be at risk of falling short or even failing catastrophically. This is a daunting challenge since the actual governance landscape have dynamically evolved far more sophisticatedly than the usual well-framed “control” models that are embedded within traditional domains of administrative, public administration and political theories. The purpose of this paper is to articulate an alternative analysis of governance -relevant themes based on systems theoretic principles. This study utilizes a system-of-systems (SoS) conceptualization of governance that relates (1) a ‘governed’ system—the target of governance , with (2) a ‘governing’ system—the direct controller of the ‘governed’ system, (3) a ‘metagovernance’ systems—a metasystem that strategically influences the ‘governing’ system directly and the ‘governed’ system indirectly, and (4) its contextual environment—as anything external to the supposed SoS boundary. The paper will discuss how the symbols of governance that perpetuate “myths of control” thinking within the emergent infranomics discourse will be better understood incorporating for instance pluralist perspectives, role of the observer, and information—a few example of concepts and principles that are well-articulated in systems-based theories and approaches. The main contribution of this study is a set of systems-based ideas representing governance that will continue to remain relevant in spite of emergent problems and increased complexity.

Complexity Induced Vulnerability Assessment: How Resilient are Our Academic Programs?

Academic departments in the field of critical societal infrastructures need to assess and upgrade their existing programs and course offerings for several important reasons such as: (1) to regularly assess a curricula’s structure, (2) to maintain competitiveness, (3) to assess the resiliency of a given academic program, and (4) to ensure its relevance to the fast changing environment and context among others. This work builds on previous work to apply the previously developed resiliency assessment methodology to compare and ascertain some similarities and divergences in two Engineering Management programs, albeit in the same discipline but offered in different countries. A graph theory-based complexity perspective was used as a tool to make a comparative assessment of the course offerings between the two programs. Specifically, we can regard a Graduate program offering as a multi-component (many body) system consisting of its internal connectivity (i.e. combination of course offering as member interactions) defining structural complexity and as a source of vulnerability, hence resiliency. Authors propose an alternate methodology that combines the state-of-the-art in clustering text analysis as well as complexity-induced vulnerability quantitative methodologies recently used in performance quantification of complex systems.

A Collective Reflection on the Ph.D. Student's Journey: Shades of Technicism and Epistemic Pluralism

This essay is a reflection on the three authors’ collective PAT-Net experience. Their perspective as Ph.D. students is unique in that they had to balance a plethora of diverse roles while involved in conference planning and preparing to be conference participants. The authors’ perspective is further enriched by the fact that they come from different, disjointed disciplines. Perhaps most noteworthy in their combined conference experience was the presentation of the ideas of technicism and epistemic pluralism, which they recognized could be pertinent and useful in engaging a growing list of disciplines that share a common interest in contemporary governance.