System Performance/Measures of Effectiveness

The complete city system can only improve properly if we choose the right performance metrics to judge it by. An optimization function that optimizes the wrong metric will certainly cut you short of fulfilling your goals. For a city, the metrics we would want to track include:

1. Resource production/consumption ratio per cell. An effective system would need to be efficient at doing a lot with the resources it has available to consume. We should emphasize efficiency over minimizing total resource use, since the latter would often result in some form of stagnation.

2. Transportation overhead. We should establish metrics to track the ratio of resources spent on the connective infrastructure compared to the nodes and activities it actually supports. Of course, this also needs to be balanced with the need for growth and interconnectivity, so allocating resources towards maintaining and extending transportation systems should be a secondary goal to increasing productivity.

3. Sustainability. The environment is usually the first to give up resources or absorb waste when they can not be serviced elsewhere. However, we often do not know the environment's total capacity for restoring waste byproducts back into useful resources. The burden should be placed on the industries who exercise the environment the most to prove what that capacity might be in order to achieve a suitable equilibrium.

4. Quality of life. We can measure this by tracking the ability of the system to respond to the population units' resource requests to maintain their desired standard of living. It will be difficult to establish a calibrated baseline, however, since this performance measure will be relative to historical measurements. We can only attempt to keep the quality from dropping below former levels.