Equity and Fairness Norms in Sociotechnical Systems: Emerging Perspectives for Design

Equity and fairness are important socially relevant issues that are rarely considered or quantitatively studied in engineering systems analysis and technical design. Sociotechnical systems that provide important services, such as water supply, energ supply, transportation services, and telecommunication services, are largely designed using measures of technical performance and cost. Given the vital links of these systems to social welfare, it is important that techno-economic criteria (for guiding design) are augmented with socially important considerations such as equity and fairness. Here, an initial conceptual framework and some quantitative measures of equity are presented. An irrigation network is discussed as an application case. Statistical variation of its normalized performance (ratios of actual versus planned service) across spatially separated parts of the system, and spatial variation of reliability are used as measures of equity. The irrigation system exhibited median reliability of 84% over a decade, however, system equity had little to no improvement. The influence of a network’s architecture on evolution of degrees of fairness is discussed, and simulations-based analyses show relationship between network structure and variation of fairness norms. The cases show that inclusion of equity measures in design and operations optimization can be formalized, and equity in resource allocation resulting from emergent behavior can be impacted via promoting and steering collective fairness norms.