Modeling is an essential approach for understanding the complexities, interdependencies, and impacts of decisions made with regards sustainability in complex ecosystems. This workshop builds on the long culture of scientific modeling for sustainability (starting from the models used by `The Limit To Growth’ movement in 1972, up to the highly-complex, planetary-scale climate and ocean dynamics modeling of today). There is also a rich culture of modeling in software engineering, as exemplified by the many intellectual results and modeling tools and artefacts developed by the MODELS conference and associated community. However, these two perspectives of modeling are rarely combined. This new and exciting workshop will seek a synthesis of such scientific and engineering models, bringing them together for the purpose of engineering systems that nurture improved societal, environmental and economic sustainability. In particular, we aim to lower the barrier of engagement in this area through exemplars and benchmarks. We thus provide a direct avenue for the MODELS community to engage with modeling for sustainability and hence aim to improve our capacity in building and using such models.
The longer-term goal of the workshop is to build a series of fully documented and accessible benchmarks as a key resource in the area of modeling for sustainability.
The objectives of this workshop are:
- To initiate a collection of exemplars (i.e., reference examples) that would demonstrate how sustainability can be modeled and fostered in different domains;
- To offer benchmarks for the community going forward;
- To initiate a growing community of modelers engaged with the topic of sustainability;
- To generate real improvements in the published exemplars through investigation of different modeling approaches and paradigms;
- To stimulate new ideas for models to address sustainability challenges.