An adaptive system for proactively supporting sustainability goals

We have developed a software application for a new, emerging approach to sustainability reporting, where a multi-agent system is an integral part of the overall architecture. The agent-oriented approach readily achieves the functionality required for this application, and the Belief Desire Intention (BDI) agent framework assisted in clarifying system behaviour across our heterogeneous, crossdisciplinary research team. It has recently been suggested that current reporting practices are failing to capture the full picture of whether an organisation’s practices are sustainable, e.g. [5, 1, 2]. This is due, in part, to the way economic issues are often considered independently from environmental and social issues, and vice versa. Moreover, sustainability reporting is typically addressed using either locally defined or external, standardised indicator sets. This forces a choice between measuring what is most relevant to the organisation, on the one hand, and what allows for comparability with other organisations, on the other. There is a need to support organisations to use a combination of indicators that capture specific local concerns and indicators which can be used to communicate and compare the organisation’s performance externally.