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.

Dennis F. X. Mathaise is Professor of Management Science in the Department of Mathematics and Science at Babson College, and holds a doctor of philosophy degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For 20 years he was a research engineer at MIT.

Joel M. Manary holds a Master of Science degree in Logistics and Systems Acquisition Management from the Air Force Institute of Technology. He is an MIT research fellow, and has participated in several studies as part of the MIT Advanced Studies Program. He is a Senior Systems Engineer for Ocean Systems Engineering Corporation. He is the lead systems engineering subject matter expert for the Systems Engineering Process Office, a staff agency supporting SPA WAR systems center Pacific in San Diego, California.

Ned H. Criscimagna is the owner of Criscimagna Consulting LLC, providing consulting services in reliability and maintainability (R&M). From June 1993 to the spring of 2006, he was a senior engineer with the System Reliability Center of Alion Science & Technology. Criscimagna received his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, received his master’s degree in systems engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology, and did his postgraduate work in systems engineering and human factors at the University of Southern California. He completed the U.S. Air Force Squadron Officer School in residence, the U.S. Air Force Air Command and Staff College by seminar, and the Industrial College of the Armed Forces correspondence program in National Security Management. He is also a graduate of the Air Force Instructors Course and completed the ISO 9000 Assessor/Lead Assessor Training Course. Criscimagna is a former member of the American Society for Quality (ASQ) and a senior member of the Society of Logistics Engineers. He is a certified professional logistician, chaired the ASQ/ANSI Z-1 Dependability Subcommittee, was a member of the US TAG to IEC TC56, and secretary for the G-11 Division of the Society of Automotive Engineers. He has been involved in projects related to defense acquisition reform. These have included a project for the Department of Defense in which he led an effort to benchmark commercial reliability practices. He led the development of a handbook on maintainability to replace MIL-HDBK-470 and MIL-HDBK-471, and the update to MIL-HDBK-338, Electronic Reliability Design Handbook. Before joining Alion, he spent 7 years with ARINC Research Corporation and, prior to that, 20 years in the U.S. Air Force. He has over 32 years experience in project management, acquisition, logistics, R&M, and availability.