Rapid digitalization is causing an increase in energy consumption by IT systems, significant progress has been made in improving the energy efficiency of hardware, data center facilities, and network, while on software, instead, advancements need to be made, in order to develop applications applying sustainability criteria.
The project is very innovative because the literature is at an embryonic stage and the presence of trade-offs between technology, performance, features, and consumption does not allow universal solutions to be identified. The objective of AppDCO2 is to support enterprises with specific applications either in their decision-making process when choosing their tech partner companies or in assessing the impact of their internal applications and finding ways to reduce it.
We developed a prototype, conducting also experiments on two selected applications, capable of monitoring the resource consumption, converting it into energy consumption, and then into an economic cost in real-time. The prototype provides: (i) a sustainability rating calculated from individual factors affecting the software efficiency, including database, frontend, backend, architecture, etc., (ii) indications on which factors / levers to reduce the emissions.
This work establishes a structured methodology for assessing energy consumption that can be replicated to other applications.