Sustainable Software Engineering

Sustainability or sustainable development means satisfying the needs of the present in such a way as not to restrict the opportunities of future generations. In this regard, it is important to consider the three dimensions of sustainability – economically efficient, socially just, ecologically viable – on equal terms.

We attach great importance to taking these three dimensions of sustainability into account in our research and in our applications.

For us, sustainable development means considering environmental aspects on the same level as social and economic aspects, because it should be the goal of society as a whole to deal with global resources in an environmentally friendly and responsible manner.

Green Computing is a collective term for all efforts to use information and communication technology (ICT) for the purpose of conserving resources in society or in the economy (Green by IT) or to operate ICT itself in a sustainable and resource-conserving manner (Green IT).

At its core, it is always about resource conservation, but it is clear to everyone that resource conservation can be achieved in different ways: for example, by constructing systems in such a way that they consume fewer resources, or by using them for a particularly long time so that resources do not have to be used again to manufacture them. Or by keeping resources in a cycle – i.e., reusing things.

There are certain design goals when building systems and therefore naturally also when developing software. Currently, sustainability is an important topic that ultimately affects many things in software engineering, also at Fraunhofer IESE: for example, the architectures, i.e., the way in which software is structured. However, it is also reflected in the system software, i.e., in the operating systems, which must have certain capabilities on which to build. And the focus on sustainability does, of course, also have an influence on the development methodology itself – that is, on processes that allow the right decisions to be made early on and to ensure that these decisions have the effect desired by the engineer.

Smart Cities and sustainability are inextricably linked. Smart technologies in cities can make a crucial contribution to conserving valuable resources and thus overcoming the energy crisis. The Digital Twin, in particular, is seen as having great potential in this context. In industry, the added value of Digital Twins has already been recognized; now cities are also developing digital images of the diverse processes in buildings, streets, waterways, and power grids.
The IESE experts are convinced that the development of Digital Twins for Smart Cities and Smart Regions is only just beginning. 

However, the Digital Twin not only offers great potential for cities, but also for rural areas. For example, mapping decentralized energy generation could be relevant for a rural area, as significantly more photovoltaic systems in private households generate energy here compared to large cities. In a city, on the other hand, an integrated energy concept in which e-mobility plays a key role could be mapped. This means that although the use cases are similar, they may differ in their characteristics and implementation between urban and rural areas.

The Industry 4.0 middleware BaSyx has been developed over the past few years by Fraunhofer IESE together with many other partners. It is available to interested parties as open source and is designed as a kind of toolkit from which companies can obtain precisely those components for specific use cases that they need at the time. This also includes the principle of Asset Administration Shells, for example.

These are standardized Digital Twins with a uniform structure. Each Asset Administration Shell contains submodels that map the status of the real asset and also provide live data as required. In short, the Asset Administration Shell contains all the data about the properties of a product and its manufacturing history and can process this data using algorithms.

And now back to the issue of greenwashing: The principle of Asset Administration Shells also provides for the so-called CO2 submodel. This documents the carbon footprint of a manufacturer’s own production steps across manufacturers, as well as that of the production steps of all suppliers, and thus enables documentation along the entire supply chain of a product. This makes it possible to clearly trace how much CO2 was generated during the manufacture of a product. Rough estimation errors, which are currently still very common in many ESG reports, can thus be eliminated.