Sustainability in Emergent Systems

Dear Colleagues,

All experts in climate change encourage us to seriously consider sustainability in all aspects of our daily life, and this also has consequences in how we develop, deploy, and run our systems. However, are we correctly adapting our development and deployment methods to the urgent necessity of moving to a greener world? This is especially important in emergent domains such as cyberphysical, Internet of Things, cloud or edge computing systems, where the same software usually runs in a myriad of heterogeneous devices, sometimes with very different and limited resources (battery, computation, memory). Therefore, energy efficiency in every part, from the hardware through the communication protocols to the application design and deployment, is a key issue when developing systems for such domains. Finally, the increasing instrumentation of the physical world by intelligent sensors has generated a massive amount of data that need to be processed in data centers in the cloud or on near devices at the edge of the network. Such massive processing has generated a growing increase in energy consumption, which has been a recent concern. Greener and more sustainable solutions optimizing energy consumption when processing IoT and CPS data are increasingly needed.  

This Special Issue seeks to answer several questions. The first question is whether sustainability is already considered, or not yet, a foreground system quality attribute, at the same level of importance as other traditional quality attributes, such as correctness, execution efficiency, usability or security. The second question is at what levels sustainability is being integrated in software engineering, for instance, through the definition of green middleware, application containers, virtualization software or deployment algorithms. Finally, how and to what degree are systems for massive data processing incorporating techniques that optimize energy consumption, for instance, via prediction models, to make such systems more sustainable? We can certainly say that the topics covered by this Special Issue are already considered in the literature, where sustainability is now influencing all aspects of system development. However, it is not yet clear how these initiatives and approaches raised at the research level are being successfully translated to industrial software projects, in the practice, or what would really make a difference in our society toward a more sustainable future. For this reason, the main purpose of this Special Issue is to answer to these questions, providing at the same time a global view of the current state of the art of sustainability for emergent systems. All the topics listed below are in the context of these emergent systems (i.e., cyberphysical, Internet of Things, cloud or edge computing systems).

Dr. Monica Pinto
Dr. Mercedes Amor
Dr. Flavia Coimbra Delicato
Guest Editors

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