A Proposal of Behavior-Based Consumption Profiles for Green Software Design

Despite the increase in the efficiency of energy consumption in information and communication technology, software execution and its constraints are responsible for how energy is consumed in hardware hosts. Consequently, researchers have promoted the development of sustainable software with new development methods and tools to lessen its hardware demands. However, the approaches developed so far lack cohesiveness along the stages of the software development life cycle (SDLC) and exist outside of a holistic method for green software development (GSD). In addition, there is a severe lack of approaches that target the analysis and design stages of the SDLC, leaving software architects and designers unsupported. In this article, we introduce our behavior-based consumption profile (BBCP) external Domain-Specific Language (DSL), aimed at assisting software architects and designers in modeling the behavior of software. The models generated with our external DSL contain multiple sets of properties that characterize features of the software’s behavior. In contrast to other modeling languages, our BBCP emphasizes how time and probability are involved in software execution and its evolution over time, helping its users to gather an expectation of software usage and hardware consumption from the initial stages of software development. To illustrate the feasibility and benefits of our proposal, we conclude with an analysis of the model of a software service created using the BBCP, which is simulated using Insight Maker to obtain an estimation of hardware consumption and later translated to energy consumption.