One of the key challenges of green software is that various aspects have an impact to the overall energy consumption over the lifetime of a system operated by software. In particular, in the field of industrial applications, where embedded devices cooperate with many IT systems to make the industrial processes more efficient, to reduce waste or raw materials, and to save the environment, the concept of green software becomes unclear. In this paper, we address the green aspects of software in different phases – software construction, software execution, and software control in both inside an individual component and as a part of a complete industrial application. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the insight into system knowledge, not aspects related to software per se, is the key to create truly green software. Consequently, when considering truly software green, the focus is to be placed on the system level savings for embedded systems at the highest possible level where domain knowledge can be taken into account, not on software development or execution.
['Krzysztof Sierszecki', 'Michaela Steffens', 'Thomas Fogdal', 'Juha Savolainen', 'Tommi Mikkonen']
Towards green power electronics: software controllers and domain knowledge