Project Description
Maintainability
Maintainability is the ease of changing code, such as adding features or fixing bugs. As systems evolve, maintenance costs inevitably rise, so teams must invest in practices like refactoring. These tasks may not deliver immediate business features, but they preserve quality, reduce risk, and pay off in the long run.
Energy Efficiency and Material Use
The second aspect focuses on energy efficiency and material use. It addresses the power that software consumes and the carbon emissions that result. With energy prices rising and carbon targets tightening, teams building cloud applications and cyber-physical systems must optimize how software executes—not just upgrade hardware. It also involves material choices and product design so systems are upgradeable, refurbishable, and recyclable. This extends product lifetimes and ensures components are replaced only when necessary, reducing both energy use and environmental impact.
Maintainability and energy efficiency often pull in opposite directions. Code tuned for lower power can become harder to maintain (more complexity, hidden dependencies, broken design rules), while clean, modular designs aren’t always the most energy-efficient. MAST makes these trade-offs explicit and guides teams to balanced decisions that fit stakeholder needs and technical/environmental constraints.
Business Impact
- Reduce the carbon footprint as well as the technical debt of their systems, subsequently optimizing development and operational costs. A transparent and reduced carbon footprint translates directly into better sales position, while improved development safeguards the long-term technology position to bring new opportunities to the market.
- Respond to the increased sustainability concerns of customers and end-users, as well as their own employees. Transparent communication will address intangible as well as tangible customer needs that relate to environmental sustainability, resulting in a better business position.
- Gain the necessary insights and data to demonstrate their compliance to sustainability regulations such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and beyond.
- Be more competitive by increasing the quality level of the delivered products as well as the agility to implement necessary changes.
- Create new business models for software applications which can be scheduled dynamically, to be more aligned with the production of renewable energy sources.
- Develop modular products that are upgradable, recyclable and more easily refurbished as a result of the design choices in which software, energy use and material composition are integrated.
What is the innovation?
- Solve complex trade-offs to keep code easy to change while reducing environmental impact.
- Provide win-win options for stakeholders with conflicting priorities (developers, customers, operators).
- Integrate with the development environment for continuous monitoring of maintainability and carbon footprint, and auto-create optimization tasks in the backlog.
The consortium combines knowledge institutes (3), SMEs (3), and large industry (2) across software maintenance and carbon optimization, with solution and case providers in Green Computing and Green CPS.
