Collaborative Research: EAGER: Towards a Design Methodology for Software-Driven Sustainability

随着计算技术在我们社会中的扩散，软件在促进和解决可持续性挑战方面发挥着越来越重要的作用。尽管其重要性，但是，可持续性仍然是开发人员中理解不多的概念，普遍缺乏可用于设计和验证可持续性的软件系统的工具，知识和技术。该项目旨在将可持续性提升为软件的一流质量属性，可以明确分析和设计，并为开发人员提供将可持续性构建到其系统中的方法。此外，该项目还提供了新颖的设计策略和模式，可以影响用户对计算产品的可持续使用的行为。该项目的成果为进一步研究软件工程技术和可持续计算方法奠定了基础。为了深入了解软件工程中的可持续性挑战，该项目的第一步是对网络物理系统、物联网和移动的系统等新兴可持续性相关领域的软件应用进行实证调查。接下来，根据这项研究的结果，该项目采用完善的需求工程方法来定义可持续性作为质量属性，场景和指标的集合。最后，在此定义的基础上，该项目开发了一个设计策略和模式的目录，开发人员可以使用它们将可持续性作为一个明确的目标构建到他们的系统中。该项目还旨在建立一个软件工程和其他学科的研究人员社区，以鼓励在可持续性研究方面增加未来的活动。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

With the proliferation of computing technologies in our society, software plays an increasingly prominent role in contributing to and solving sustainability challenges. Despite its importance, however, sustainability remains a poorly understood concept among developers, with a general lack of tools, knowledge, and techniques that can be used to design and validate software systems that account for sustainability. This project aims to elevate sustainability as a first-class quality attribute of software that can be explicitly analyzed and designed for and to empower developers with methods for building sustainability into their systems. In addition, this project contributes novel design strategies and patterns that can influence the behavior of users towards sustainable use of computing products. The outcome of this project lays a foundation for further research in software engineering techniques and methodologies for sustainable computing.To develop an in-depth understanding of sustainability challenges in software engineering, the first step in this project involves an empirical investigation of software applications in emerging, sustainability-relevant domains such as cyber-physical systems, IoT and mobile systems. Next, based on the outcome of this study, the project employs well-established requirements engineering methods to define sustainability as a collection of quality attributes, scenarios, and metrics. Finally, building on this definition, the project develops a catalog of design strategies and patterns that developers can use to build sustainability into their system as an explicit goal. This project also aims to establish a community of researchers in software engineering and other disciplines to encourage increased future activities in sustainability research.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.