Toward Model-Driven Sustainability Evaluation

Sustainability—the capacity to endure—has emerged as a concern of central relevance for society. However, the nature of sustainability is distinct from other concerns addressed by computing research, such as automation, self-adaptation, or intelligent systems. It demands the consideration of environmental resources, economic prosperity, individual well being, social welfare, and the evolvability of technical systems. Thus, it requires a focus not just on productivity, effectiveness, and efficiency, but also the consideration of longer-term, cumulative, and systemic effects of technology interventions, as well as lateral side effects not foreseen at the time of implementation. Furthermore, sustainability includes normative elements and encompasses multi-disciplinary aspects and potentially diverging views. As a wicked problem (see the sidebar “Wicked Problems”), it challenges business-as-usual in many areas of engineering and computing research