Integrating sustainability in decision-making processes: A modelling strategy

One of the most difficult problems that humanity currently faces is the sustainable development of our society, i.e. how to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Solving this challenge requires a multidisciplinary approach where researchers with different backgrounds combine their efforts. As software engineers, we can contribute to these efforts by offering existing software requirements modeling and analysis techniques as a means to integrate sustainability requirements in decision-making processes. In this paper, we use a popular language for modeling early requirements as a way to visualize the impact of alternative options on sustainability goals and to analyze the conflicts between sus-tainability and other problem-specific objectives. We apply this idea to the decision-making activities pertaining to the organization of the ICSE’09 conference itself. We find that the modeling activity significantly facilitates exploration, understanding and comparison of large numbers of possible sustainability measures and allows for better informed and justified decisions. 1