Green Measurements for Software Product Based on Sustainability Dimensions

Software is a central component in the modern world and vastly affects the environment’s sustainability.The demand for energy and resource require-ments is rising when producing hardware and software units.Literature study reveals that many studies focused on green hardware;however,limited efforts were made in the greenness of software products.Green software products are necessary to solve the issues and problems related to the long-term use of soft-ware,especially from a sustainability perspective.Without a proper mechanism for measuring the greenness of a particular software product executed in a specific environment,the mentioned benefits will not be attained.Currently,there are not enough works to address this problem,and the green status of software products is uncertain and unsure.This paper aims to identify the green measurements based on sustainable dimensions in a software product.The second objective is to reveal the relationships between the elements and measurements through empirical study.The study is conducted in two phases.Thefirst phase is the theoretical phase,where the main components,measurements and practices that influence the sustainability of a software product are identified.The second phase is the empirical study that involved 103 respondents in Malaysia investigating current practices of green software in the industrial environment and further identifying the main sustainability dimensions and measurements and their impact on achiev-ing green software products.This study has revealed seven green measurements of software product:Productivity,Usability,Cost Reduction,Employee Support,Energy Efficiency,Resource Efficiency and Tool Support.The relationships are statistically significant,with a significance level of less than 0.01(p=0.000).Thus,the hypothesised relationships were all accepted.The contributions of this study revolve around the research perspectives of the measurements to attain a green software product.

Industrial Green Spatial Pattern Evolution of Yangtze River Economic Belt in China

We use the directional slacks-based measure of efficiency and inverse distance weighting method to analyze the spatial pattern evolution of the industrial green total factor productivity of 108 cities in the Yangtze River Economic Belt in 2003–2013.Results show that both the subprime mortgage crisis and ‘the new normal' had significant negative effects on productivity growth,leading to the different spatial patterns between 2003–2008 and 2009–2013.Before 2008,green poles had gathered around some capital cities and formed a tripartite pattern,which was a typical core-periphery pattern.Due to a combination of the polarization and the diffusion effects,capital cities became the growth poles and ‘core' regions,while surrounding areas became the ‘periphery'.This was mainly caused by the innate advantage of capital cities and ‘the rise of central China' strategy.After 2008,the tripartite pattern changed to a multi-poles pattern where green poles continuously and densely spread in the midstream and downstream areas.This is due to the regional difference in the leading effect of green poles.The leading effect of green poles in midstream and downstream areas has changed from polarization to diffusion,while the polarization effect still leads in the upstream area.

A Cost-benefit Measuring Model of Green Products in Manufacturing Industry

The paper builds up a cost-benefit measuring model of green products in manufacturing industry throughout its full life cycle, which can quantify green products＇ cost and benefit completely and correctly under the circumstance of satisfying enterprise, customer, environment and society. It also puts forth an operable method to estimate social benefit by opportunity cost and establishes a profit maximization-programming model. The model can be applied to justify whether some kinds of green products should be developed and produced.

Dynamic design of green stormwater infrastructure

This paper compares ongoing research results on hydrologic performance to common design and crediting criteria, and recommends a change in direction from a static to a dynamic perspective to fully credit the performance of green infrastructure. Examples used in this article are primarily stormwater control measures built for research on the campus of Villanova University [1,2]. Evidence is presented demonstrating that the common practice of crediting water volume based on soil and surface storage underestimates the performance potential, and suggests that the profession move to a more dynamic approach that incorporates exfiltration and evapotranspiration. The framework for a dynamic approach is discussed, with a view to broaden our design focus by including climate, configuration and the soil surroundings. The substance of this work was presented as a keynote speech at the 2016 international Low Impact Development Conference in Beijing China [3].