Browsing by Author "Elsawah, Sondoss"

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    Development and Evaluation of System Dynamics Education Modules for Complex Socioenvironmental Systems
    Costello, Ryan Patrick (Virginia Tech, 2023-05-30)
    Complex socioenvironmental problems such as food, energy and water shortages, health impacts from environmental contamination and global climate change present significant challenges to the global community. Addressing these problems will require an interdisciplinary systems-thinking approach that coordinates problem-solving between practitioners of varied disciplines including engineers, physical scientists, economists and other social scientists. Civil and environmental engineers have distinct technical skills necessary to help address these challenges as part of coordinated multidisciplinary efforts towards the achievement of comprehensive and sustainable resolutions to these problems. Ensuring civil and environmental engineers are trained to think and work in this multidisciplinary exchange requires incorporation of systems-thinking into engineering academic curricula. Attempts have been made to incorporate these skill sets into civil and environmental engineering (CEE) coursework. These efforts, as well as evaluation of their effectiveness in training CEE students to think systemically, have lacked in coordination to integrate them as part of the overarching academic curricula. This research advances the current body of knowledge regarding incorporation of systems-thinking into CEE coursework by examining the impacts of system dynamics model based educational tools on systems-thinking learning outcomes of CEE students in a one-semester CEE elective course. The findings suggest that system dynamics modeling can be an effective tool in educating future systems thinkers in the CEE disciplines.
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    Socio-technical scales in socio-environmental modeling: Managing a system-of-systems modeling approach
    Iwanaga, Takuya; Wang, Hsiao-Hsuan; Hamilton, Serena H.; Grimm, Volker; Koralewski, Tomasz E.; Salado, Alejandro; Elsawah, Sondoss; Razavi, Saman; Yang, Jing; Glynn, Pierre; Badham, Jennifer; Voinov, Alexey; Chen, Min; Grant, William E.; Peterson, Tarla Rai; Frank, Karin; Shenk, Gary; Barton, C. Michael; Jakeman, Anthony J.; Little, John C. (2021-01)
    System-of-systems approaches for integrated assessments have become prevalent in recent years. Such approaches integrate a variety of models from different disciplines and modeling paradigms to represent a socioenvironmental (or social-ecological) system aiming to holistically inform policy and decision-making processes. Central to the system-of-systems approaches is the representation of systems in a multi-tier framework with nested scales. Current modeling paradigms, however, have disciplinary-specific lineage, leading to inconsistencies in the conceptualization and integration of socio-environmental systems. In this paper, a multidisciplinary team of researchers, from engineering, natural and social sciences, have come together to detail socio-technical practices and challenges that arise in the consideration of scale throughout the socioenvironmental modeling process. We identify key paths forward, focused on explicit consideration of scale and uncertainty, strengthening interdisciplinary communication, and improvement of the documentation process. We call for a grand vision (and commensurate funding) for holistic system-of-systems research that engages researchers, stakeholders, and policy makers in a multi-tiered process for the co-creation of knowledge and solutions to major socio-environmental problems.