Recently saw a nice talk from Sándor Tóth that involved developing methods to quantify trade-offs, here is a related paper (but I think he may have more work on this forthcoming if you want to ask him directly): Article Multi-objective optimization to evaluate tradeoffs among for...
Tradeoffs between two dimensions can be measured by determining how much of one dimension must be sacrificed to compensate for a change in the other dimension, taking into account the influence of these changes on the rating.
A trade off is defined as an exchange in which you give up one item in order to obtain something else that you also desire. A trade off would include having to put up with a half-hour commute in order to turn a profit.
As far as I understood your question, a commonly used approach to analyse the trade-offs between systems is Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), one of the decision support systems used to select a course of action that explicitly accounts for the targeted ecosystem services by setting criteria.