No abstract

The rise of global attention toward sustainability and sustainable development (SD) has provided increased incentives for research development and investment in these areas. Food systems are at the center of human needs and global population growth sustainability concerns. These drives and the need to provide quantified support for related investment projects led to the proliferation of sustainability metrics and frameworks. While questions about sustainability definition and measurement still abound, SD policy design and control increasingly need adequate quantified support instruments. This paper aims to address this need, contributing to a more consistent and integrated application of food system sustainability metrics and quantified management of the implemented solutions. After presenting the relationships between sustainability, resilience, and robustness and summarizing food system sustainability quantification developments so far, we expose complexity sciences’ potential contributions toward SD quantified evaluation, addressing prediction, intangibles, and uncertainty issues. Finding a paramount need to make sense and bring existing sustainability metrics in context for operational use, we conclude that the articulated application of multiple and independent modeling approaches at the micro, meso, and macro levels can better help the development of food SD policies and implemented solution quantified management, with due regard to confidence levels of the results obtained.

The present work aims to contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics of organizational competition and survival in a supply chain network market context, while highlighting the potential of multi-layered cellular automata models as frameworks for accommodating increasing levels of complexity. More particularly, the implementation of inter-layer rules associated to k-bit words modelling of market opportunities, customer desires and purchasing selectiveness, and their impact on the dynamics of an evolutionary "ecology" of suppliers, competing organizations, and customers, following a complex adaptive systems approach is described and illustrated through a study case on organizational survivability. The implications of the study results -reflecting the interplay between market environment, competitors' strategic choice, and corresponding ability to succeed, survive crises and proliferate -are then discussed and the main aims of the work ahead highlighted.