[Back]

S. Aleksic:
"Holistic View on the Role of ICT in Environmental Sustainability";
Talk: Going Green - CARE INNOVATION 2014, Vienna, Austria; 11-17-2014 - 11-20-2014; in: "Proceedings of the Conference Going Green - CARE INNOVATION 2014", (2014), 1 - 8.

Information and communication technology (ICT) has become an integral part of our everyday life including social interactions, business processes, technology and ecology. However, its potential benefits and risks for the environment are still not sufficiently explored. This is mainly because of the complex interdependencies between ICT and different other areas of business and society that together build a very complex ecosystem. In this paper, a holistic approach that treats ICT as a part of the global ecosystem is introduced. This approach combines data-centric methods that are typically used to analyze communication networks with widely applicable thermodynamic tools. The proposed approach is well suited to investigate complex heterogeneous systems and assess their environmental sustainability. Within this holistic framework, the whole lifecycle of ICT components and systems is considered. In particular, we briefly discuss the application of the presented approach on evaluating the sustainability of smartphones, notebooks, data centers, switches and access network equipment. Additionally, preliminary results of an exemplary model of cloud computing use in Austria are presented.

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_230244.pdf