The Role of Software Engineering in Society 5.0

In 2016, the Japanese Council for Science, Technology and Innovation (CSTI) proposed a project about sustainable smart societies known as Society 5.0. Society 5.0 advocates the use of advances in computer science and software engineering such as internet of things, artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, as a way of resolving societal issues such as reducing the number of deaths in everyday traffic, reducing the amount of greenhouse gas emissions, and so forth. In this thesis, we report on the planning, execution, and results of a systematic mapping study aiming at understanding the role of software engineering in Society 5.0. To this end, we focus on identifying the main software engineering technologies enabling Society 5.0 as well as the main software engineering open challenges hampering its realisation. Starting from an initial set of 829 peer-reviewed publications and by means of a rigorous selection process, we selected a final set of 58 primary studies, which we analysed following a meticulous data extraction, analysis, and synthesis process. The selected primary studies described a set of 13 software engineering technologies acting as enablers of Society 5.0. The application of these technologies comes with technical challenges. In this respect, the selected primary studies identified 9 software engineering open challenges hampering the realisation of Society 5.0