MAST

Managing Sustainability Tradeoffs

About the project

Modern software development faces a growing challenge. As software grows in scale and complexity, maintaining code and adding features becomes increasingly difficult and expensive.

Developers often take shortcuts to meet tight deadlines, which creates technical debt and makes future changes even harder.

At the same time, the energy consumption and carbon emissions of digital systems are becoming major environmental concerns.

Optimizing software to run more efficiently is essential to lower power demands across cloud computing and cyber-physical systems.

The central problem is that these two goals often conflict with each other.

Code structured for easy maintenance is rarely the most energy efficient, while aggressive power optimizations often make software complex and difficult to maintain. Optimizing one side usually harms the other.

The MAST project aims to solve this dilemma by managing the complex trade-offs between technical and environmental sustainability.

By developing new methods and tools, MAST enables development teams to balance ease of maintenance with energy efficiency, guiding smart design decisions that optimize both code quality and carbon footprint.

Goal

The primary goal of MAST is to help development teams balance code maintainability with energy efficiency.

The project creates smart tools to optimize software design. This enables businesses to lower technical debt and reduce carbon emissions simultaneously.

Our contribution

Almende will analyze user behavior data to establish operational profiles and simulate various hardware setups.

We will quantify potential improvements in environmental and operational performance, alongside the costs associated with component replacement.

Additionally, we will integrate these modular engineering solutions into our simulation tools for robotics developers.

This allows users to evaluate robot performance across different payloads and configurations.

Through these contributions, we deliver practical tooling to balance technical efficiency, material sustainability, and energy consumption in complex cyber-physical systems.

Expected results

The MAST project will deliver software tools, methods, and real-time dashboards to continuously monitor and optimize software sustainability.

Through AI-driven tools, automated program repair, and de-facto sustainability metrics, the project empowers teams to reduce technical debt by up to 30% while lowering energy consumption and carbon emissions by up to 30%.

Partners

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