An awareness based approach to sustainability
If the STO becomes true and then false and again true , etc ., it means that there are more STP , and it is against out theory that the STP is a reliable indicator of sustainability .
There are four possible situations .
I . The system reaches the reduction goal and the STP become true only once . In other words , there is sustainability and only one STP . The number of this kind of case is recorded in the second column .
II . The system never reaches the sustainability and the STP never becomes true . There is unsustainability and zero STP . The number of this kind of case is recorded in the third column of Table 1 .
III . The system reaches sustainability and the STP becomes true several times . There is sustainability and more than one STP . The number of this kind of case is recorded in the fourth column of Table 1 .
IV . The system never reaches the sustainability and the STO becomes true one or more times . There is unsustainability and one or more STP . The number of this kind of case is recorded in the fifth column .
When situations II or I happen ( columns 2 and 3 ), the STP satisfies all the four conditions to be considered an indicator toward sustainability .
When the III or IV situations happen , the STP does not satisfy the four conditions to be considered an indicator toward sustainability . The III situation fails to satisfy Condition-4 ( the STP becomes true only once ). The IV situation fails to satisfy Condition-3 ( STP stays always false when the resource consumption trend is unsustainable .).
We have to verify if ( and to quantify how often ) the STP fails to satisfy some of the four conditions required to be a reliable indicator .
Looking at the three sets of experiments as a whole , we can say that the STP behaves as a good indicator in 92.6 % of the 243 experiments .
In 7.4 % of the total 243 experiments , it leads to some errors : 0.8 % of the results are fully wrong indications , while 6.6 % of the results are only partially wrong , because what it is wrong is the quantitative evaluation of the advance of STP toward RG , while the kind of foreseen trend is correct .
Looking at the single set of experiments , we observe that in the first set of experiments ( SET-1 ) the STP was always able to anticipate the future state of the system . In the second set ( SET-2 ), the behavior of STP failed in 20 % of the experiments . While in the third case ( SET- 3 ), there are 2.5 % of errors .
Trying to conclude , we can say that the STP relative advance can be considered a quantitative indicator able to foresee in the all cases when the system will reach the reduction goal . On the total possible final scenarios , the STP error percentage is around 7 % in average and in the worst case , it can reach the 20 %.
The availability of such an indicator can have several useful applications in decision-making
To be a useful indicator the STP has to be able to supply some quantitative information about a future state of sustainability of the system . In our case , it corresponds to know “ how early ” the STP becomes true before the system reaches the sustainability ( i . e . the reduction goal ). This time interval is expressed in terms of run number of SAM4SN . We recorded the run when STP becomes true and , for the sake of
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