A given technology sets a footprint across the landscape in terms of the resources
it consumes, the waste it produces, and the transportation linking the technology's
construction, operation, and in time, decommissioning. Although geography provides
the stage over which technology acts its role, there have been few avenues for geography
to temper the conceptual design of technology.
Consider a set of design requirements in the form of initial conditions that are
run through a decision mode (Figure 1). If the given initial conditions are inferior,
the resulting design will also be inferior; and that is why it is a basic operations
research assumption that all initial conditions must be known with certainty (Figure
2). This is particularly true when the geographic footprint of the technology is
taken into account. And oftentimes, the consequences of the footprint are not known
or understood until after the design installation. Furthermore, consequences result
when such inferior technology is allowed to take hold, creating false economies
of scale and the notion that this newly established method is the way things should
be done because it is the way they have always been done.
Here is where the mission of TGI Systems comes into play; where needs and constraints
of engineering, environmental, and socioeconomic systems are brought into balance.
The proactive design process of our company uses the total technology footprint
as feedback during the design process. Mathematical models and data systems which
capture the dynamics of labor, equipment, resources, and policy are then incorporated
into the engineering design process, well before the implementation phase.
Proactive optimization is a process to fold the costs and operational factors of
location directly into the technology design process (Figure 3). This method was
first used to show the tradeoff between either shipping toxic wastes to distinct
locations using conventional waste incinerators, or accepting the costs associated
with developing new disposal technologies and less wasteful production techniques.
When the objectives of environment, socioeconomic constraints, and engineering capabilities
are set side-by-side, the engineering flexibility of designing better processes
and equipment proves much more flexible than the constraints of environment, location,
transportation, disposal, and population.
As a corollary to the proactive design process, TGI Systems carries as its foremost
tools that established ways of doing things are not by default the best ways of
doing things, that established economies of scale can be false, and indeed that
established economy of scale may in fact be the root of a design problem.
