Viability standards and multi-criteria maximin

This paper deals with sustainability criteria and standards. The maximin cri-terion, as the highest performance that can be sustained over time, promotes intergenerational equity, a pivotal issue for sustainability. The viable control approach, by investigating trajectories and actions complying over time with various standards and constraints, provides major insights into strong sustain-ability. The present paper addresses the links between maximin and viability approaches in a multi-criteria context. It first shows how ‘Pareto maximin’ can be characterized through viability kernels. Such a result makes it possible to determine the trade-offs and/or synergies between non-substitutable economic and ecological standards underlying strong sustainability. The second main re-sult of the paper is to propose algorithms derived from the viability version of dynamic programming to approximate numerically Pareto maximin values, con-trols and sustainable standards. Two examples relying on renewable resource management illustrate these analytic and numerical findings.