Projects

Designing Integrated Natural Resource Conservation and Development (INRCD) Projects in Africa

The UN Sustainable Development Goals include conservation of land, water, and other resources as a top priority for sustainable development. Conservation and development seem to be conflicting goals, especially as traditional conservation initiatives adopt a non-participatory “fines and fences” approach. The World Wide Fund for Nature first introduced the concept of integrated conservation and development projects (ICDPs) in the mid 1980s, aspiring to combine social development and conservation goals through the use of socio-economic investment tools (see Wikipedia article). Integrated Natural Resource Managment (INRM) employs a strong systems thinking approach suitable for quantitative modeling and optimization. We are surveying the state of the art for design-related ICDP and INRM research as recorded in scholarly articles with particular emphasis on Africa and optimization modeling (e.g., Ochola, Sanginga, and Bekalo 2010).

We adopted the term Integrated Natural Resource Conservation and Development (INRCD) to combine the spirit of both efforts under one umbrella term. Below are current INRCD projects we are working on. See also the listed publications for more details.

Development of the System Design Optimization Tool INRCD-OPT for WEF projects

The INRCD-OPT software modular system comprises of three subsystems: crops, irrigation, and microgrid that must be designed all together to maximize the community benefit.

Studies on Integrated Natural Resource Conservation and Development (INRCD) aim at developing technologies to conserve land, energy, water, and other resources.. In most cases, a system design optimization approach can adopted for INRCD projects to ensure the twin benefits of enhancing economic development and conserving the natural resources of local communities. A major need of INRCD projects is for quantitative tools that can support decision-making at the local and regional levels. These tools should have the capacity to integrate engineering design decisions with the socio-economic needs and benefits of the local communities to provide optimal solutions for INRCD projects while focusing on profit and sustainability index as system optimization objectives.
We are developing INCRD-OPT, a simulation-based system design optimization tool for modeling and optimization of WEF (Water-Energy-Food) projects, integrating irrigation, microgrid, and crop cultivation subsystems to support small landholder farming communities in their decision-making process.

Resilience Optimization in Agricultural/Farming Systems

Resilience optimization model of agricultural systems

The resilience of farming systems to climate-related shocks and natural disasters has become important when discussing the sustainability of farming systems and can be integrated into quantitative decision-making tools, such as the INRCD-OPT, as a system objective function to be optimized. Climate change results in shocks such as droughts, floods, heat waves, hurricanes, and severe winds that affect the productivity of agricultural systems. These shocks on agricultural systems are a serious threat to food security and a great danger to the achievement of sustainable development goal two which seeks to achieve zero hunger all over the world. This project seeks to understand, quantify, optimize and suggest the right resilience methods to adopt and apply in agricultural systems to ensure food security, sustainability, and profitability using system optimization tools such as the INRCD - OPT

Rethinking Energy Systems and Transitions in Africa: The Case for S. Africa's Rapidly Tranforming Elecrticity Sector

Electricity profile in South Africa

Current status: South Africa has had an energy monopoly where the national electric utility, Eskom, dominates the sector. Electricity generation is mainly thermal coal-powered electricity (82%). Most thermal plants are over 40 years old (versus 25-30-year-old std. plant life). There were 207 days of load-shedding (no power) or brown-outs in 2022 vs. 71 days in 2021 with estimated 280 days of load-shedding in 2023.

Emergence of New Sector Actors (2022-2023). New laws allow new energy producers: Small and Embedded Generators (SEGs), Prosumers, Independent Power Producers (IPPs), Municipalities, Licensed Energy Traders, and National Energy Regulator (NERSA).

Optimization problems In a decentralized system: (i) How do we design reliable, technically-and-cost-efficient, decarbonized, decentralized, inclusive, and affordable power systems & markets? (ii) What is the appropriate design for each type of energy node created by the new actors above -- essentially microgrids that satisfy local needs and possibly provide excess capacity back to the grid?

Scholarly Design Research for Sustainable Development in Africa: State of the Art Review

Like many design researchers around the world, the ODE lab is interested in applying our unique design skills to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals. As we have begun the Africa-Design initiative, we are interested in understanding more about design research related to SDGs in Africa. This paper describes our first broad and cursory review of design related research about SDGs in Africa. Part of our long-term goal is to create more awareness, collaboration, and synergies within the design community. We would like to better understand who is publishing, what they are publishing, and where they are publishing to begin facilitating meaningful design research connections.

In our first review we found differences in topic representation and collaboration trends between African-based and non-African based researchers. Interestingly, we learned that the large research community writing on water related issues in Africa are primarily outside of Africa. We also found that agriculture related papers had relatively higher collaboration than energy related papers. We believe that this may be part of the reason why subtopics within the agriculture papers were similar between African and non-African based researchers whereas the energy papers had dissimilar subtopics. This review validates our need as a research group to connect and collaborate with Africa-based design researchers. If you have any questions, comments, or would like to learn more please reach out to us.

See Full Paper

Funding Design and Innovation for Sustainable Development in Africa: Review of Sources

Funding for design impacts the practical ability to address relevant problems. Using public sources, we explore what funding sources have been available to support design and business innovations for sustainable development in Africa provided by NGOs, governments, and multinational organizations. In the literature, "design" is often not explicitly stated as a funding objective and so we use "innovation" as a suitable surrogate.

We focused on agriculture, energy, sanitation, and urban development, with successful or promising project examples. Some conclusions are:

country location, population or economic size do not drive government R&D spending;
agricultural R&D funding is below targets;
and NGOs combine funding with education and skill-building opportunities.

See Full Paper

Student Projects: Design for Sustainable Development

The UM course Analytical Product Design (APD) is a course on design thinking grounded on design science; it blends multidisciplinary engineering design, product design, human-centered design, and product-directed entrepreneurship.

Students work in teams to apply the methods on a design project starting with exploration and definition of the design problem, and continuing with concept generation and selection, design embodiment, prototyping and design verification.

Collaborations with students and faculty from other institutions, including online collaborations, are welcome.

If interested in initiating a course similar to the Analytical Product Design course at UM, please contact Prof. Papalambros (pyp at umich.edu)

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