Energize sustainability: EnSAF for sustainability aware, software intensive energy management systems

India’s coal use for electricity jumped 13% in 2021–22. Energy management systems (EnMS) are seen as a solution, but only sustainable EnMS can have a discernable impact on the carbon footprint and the Return On Investment (ROI). Designing a software-intensive sustainable energy management system requires considering technical, environmental, social, and economic factors. This helps evaluate an EnMS’s overall impact and improve its design. We proposed EnSAF for efficient utilization of the energy incurred for the design of sustainability-aware EnMSs. In this work, EnMSs in diverse use cases were selected and analyzed in terms of technical, social, environmental, and economic dimensions of sustainability in collaboration with various stakeholders. The set of application-specific design concerns and Quality Attributes (QAs) were addressed by the Sustainability Assessment Framework (SAF) toolkit. The resultant SAF instances of each EnMS, derived through the analysis and discussion with the stakeholders, were then analyzed to advocate the DMs and SQ model for generic EnMSs. This study demonstrated the following outcomes (i) technical concerns dominate the existing EnMSs (ii) integration of renewable energy resources reduces dependency to the main power grid and nurtures a sustainable environment by diminishing carbon footprint, and minimizing payback time, in the economic dimension; (iii) extant definitions of quality attributes need significant scrutiny and updates apropos of objectives of EnMSs The SAF toolkit was found to be deficient in the representation of relevant design concerns and quality attributes concomitant with sustainable EnMS. Prevailing DMs are inept to factor in stakeholder’s concerns, as the model is ill-equipped to account for spatio-temporal representation of QAs. Pursuant to the insights from the 4 SAF instances, a generic framework, EnSAF, is proposed to tackle the relevant concerns apropos of EnMS sustainability. This work proposed a representation of DMs in the SAF toolkit specifically for sustainability-aware EnMS.