Carbon Considerations for Systems Evolution

In the early stages of systems development, systems engineers will typically evaluate alternatives based on performance, cost, risk, and schedule to evaluate the solution space of alternatives. While these criteria have proven to be successful, there is growing interest in the analysis of carbon costs as well to contribute to the decision making. These decision criteria are very good to help the decision maker select the best alternative within the solution space in which to develop a system concept. We offer another criterion for consideration to account for carbon expenditure throughout the systems engineering lifecycle. We believe that including this dimension can influence decision makers to evaluate a richer portion of the solution space. This approach is developed and exercised with a notional example.