ABSTRACT

Self-sustainability is a property of a system; a system is considered to be self-sustainable if it can sustain itself without external support in an observed period of time. If this property is mapped to a human settlement in context of resources (water, energy, food, etc.), it would describe a human settlement which is independent of external resources (like the national electrical grid or a central water distribution system), where such external resources are either not available, or not desirable.

This article contributes to presenting the state-of-the-art overview of self-sustainability-related research. While self-sustainability as in the above described form was not a direct subject of research, there are several fields which are either related to, or could be of significant value to the self-sustainability research in this context. The extensive literature overview also showed no frameworks for modeling self sustainable systems in the context of human settlements. Herein a motivation for using agent-based modeling and simulation techniques will be given.

KEY WORDS

self-sustainability, sustainable development, multi-agent systems, agent-based modelling

CLASSIFICATION