Section: Overall Objectives

Overview

STEEP started in January 2010, initially as an Inria “Action Exploratoire” (2010+2011). It is currently an “équipe centre” of Inria Grenoble - Rhône-Alpes and is also affiliated with the Jean Kuntzmann laboratory (LJK (http://ljk.imag.fr/ )). The process of creating an EPI (équipe projet Inria) is underway and planned to be completed in 2013.

STEEP is an interdisciplinary research team devoted to systemic modelling and simulation of the interactions between the environmental, economic and social factors in the context of a transition to sustainability at local (sub-national) scales. Our goal is to develop decision-making tools to support decision makers in the implementation of this transition by developing simulation and optimization programs. In other words, our objective is to set up some mathematical and computational tools which enable us to provide some parts of the answer to the challenges how to operate the sustainable development at local scales? and which local governance for environmental public policies?.

This theme is new at Inria, but also for the researchers of STEEP who previously worked in other fields. Elise Arnaud, Emmanuel Prados and Peter Sturm worked on computer vision and Pierre-Yves Longaretti is a physicist. Some STEEP staff are still in the process of their own thematic transition and a significant part of their activity is not or only briefly mentioned in this document.

The work of STEEP follows several research directions, covering different application domains; these are described in “Scientific Foundations” and “Application Domains” respectively.