Contributions published at Informatics and Sustainability Research (Lorenz Hilty)

The Editorial chapter offers an insight into the role of quality assurance in higher education from the perspective of its transformative capacity in pursuing more sustainable development. With references to the contributions of the book, the editors explore emerging models of quality assurance as a result of innovative higher education policies and changing societal expectations. A range of examples from European, Asia-Pacific and North American countries demonstrate a range of quality issues at the institutional, national and international level. Understanding of future-oriented competences and their open-ended development in the context of higher education institutions’ (HEIs) strategies represents one of the spotlights of the article. Other critical aspects that are essential precondition for reorientation of HEIs towards sustainable development will be redefinition of the notion of quality, holistic management of quality assurance (‘a whole institution approach’) and multiple partnerships within and outside academia.

This paper's intention is to provide a structured overview on the subject of planned obsolescence concerning IT based devices. The first step is the development of a distinct definition of planned obsolescence which is divided into four subgroups: the planning of qualitative, technological, functional and fashionable obsolescence. Secondly, the historical background, possible economic causes and their relation to the technological progress are presented. It is followed by the identification of potential approaches for planned obsolescence of IT based devices. The derived hypothesis is based on its presumed advantageous characteristics. Four different kinds of planned obsolescence can be identified: Coupling the device's lifespan with a short-lived component; coupling the lifespan with a wearing part; programming the obsolescence; software-induced obsolescence. Finally, the principle of the organisational and economic separation of soft- and hardware as a possibility to avoid software-induced planned obsolescence is described.

The workshop on Energy Efficient Systems (EES), in its second year, was organized by the EC (FP7) ECO2Clouds project. EES primarily focuses on energy efficiency in ICT systems with the extended scope of systems or technological solutions that may be supported by ICTs. The purpose of EES is to bring together research and industrial efforts focusing on achieving energy efficiency and to discuss ways innovative ideas of mutual interest. This year the workshop on EES was collocated with the 2nd International Conference on ICT for Sustainability. This report presents an overview of the workshop, the paper presented and the discussions that took place during the workshop.

This study discusses the potential of applying agent-based modeling (ABM) to wood markets. A corresponding model of the wood market of a Swiss canton, consisting of a coupled roundwood and wood fuel market, is presented. The model includes wood-producing agents, such as public foresters and private forest owners, roundwood-consuming agents, such as sawmills, different classes of wood fuel consumers, and in-between wood traders. Other important model elements include agent interaction and negotiation, execution and scheduling structures, and agent adaptation mechanisms. Two sets of scenarios demonstrate the model's power for scenario exploration. The first set of scenarios analyzes the effects of an excess and scarce supply of wood on both markets. The second set looks for the optimal number of roundwood agents in the market from the perspective of the various stakeholders involved. Taking a more in-depth view of important design decisions and their pros and cons, this study argues that ABM offers new opportunities for the explorative study of wood markets as a result of these markets' special characteristics.

The goal of Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) is to estimate the environmental impact of a product or service by analysing the outputs to the environment of each step in the product's life cycle. To do this, Unit-Process data is necessary which represent individual self contained steps in this life cycle. In this study I analyse the spatial specificity, an important aspect of data quality, of Unit-Processes across multiple Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) databases. Unit-Processes are classified into thematic categories and the regionalisation of Unit-Processes per category is studied using qualitative and quantitative approaches. A comparison of the databases is carried out resulting in the conclusion that while there are certain Unit-Process classes with systematically high or low regionalisation a lot of the spatial specificity of the data is highly reliant on data sources.

Technologies for tracking and tracing objects and people are becoming ubiquitous. The possibility to determine the location of a person (either in real-time or ex-post) often emerges as a side-effect of other activities the person is performing, such as making a phone call, using the Internet or taking a picture. It is the combination of two factors which creates considerable societal risks in addition to the obvious advantages and opportunities afforded by the positioning technologies: a drop in the voluntary nature of our use of these technologies and the increasing amount of personal data in circulation. By using a qualitative risk-assessment approach developed in an earlier TA-SWISS study, the project team identified the need for political action in several areas (from surveillance and child protection to critical infrastructures) and formulated recommendations for legislative bodies and stakeholders for minimizing the societal risks of these technologies.

Environmental Informatics has emerged as a research field in the 1990ies and is connected with the name and the work of Bernd Page. This article gives an overview of the history of the research field, from early ideas to an integrative methodology, showing how Environmental Informatics as a mediating discipline has developed over time in the context of changing technologies and environmental challenges.

The increase of web applications and web services is a contributing factor to the yearly increase of emissions caused by the ICT Industry. The goal of this master thesis is to develop an evaluation method for the energy efficiency of web applications by identifying a collection of criteria for their energy efficiency. Those criteria then provide information on what areas the web application could be improved in order to be more energy efficient. Based on those criteria an evaluation model is created. This model will then be applied to an example web application. After that problems and challenges that arose during the development of this thesis are discussed.

In a project realized at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape (WSL), the Swiss wood market has been modelled on the basis of an agent-based model. This master thesis builds on that project and provides some supporting work. A literature research has been initially conducted. The objective of that research was to find different modelling approaches of agent decision-making behaviour. In the context of this literature study, the focus has been set on energy markets. In this thesis, the discovered models are described and additionally summarized in a table. To evaluate different decision-making behaviours, an Agent-Testbed has been developed in a second step. This test-framework has been programmed as a basic Java application. Various decision-making behaviours, which were developed in the context of this work, have been integrated into this test-framework. By this way, the evaluation of these behaviours has been enabled. The performance as well as the possibility to reconstruct the behaviour of one approach by a different approach has been analysed.

Discussions are often implying difficulties for their participants. In order to face up to these problems, the CANDis project has been launched in 2010. The goal of this bachelor thesis is improving and extending the existing prototype of a debate support system (TBDis - to be discussed). In the process of improvement, the existing application has been ported to the PHP framework Symfony. The focus of this thesis is on security: Cross-Site-Request-Forgery, Cross-Site-Scripting and SQL-Injection and their countermeasures are explained in detail. Based on these findings, the security concept of TBDis has been improved, which facilitates a beta phase.

Due to its hierarchical structure and the unidirectional flow of current, the traditional power grid is going to its limits. Furthermore the liberalization of Switzerland's electricity market comes along. Other political developments aim at a reduction of fossile energy sources, at an increase in renewable energy sources for electricity production, a step-by-step phase-out of nuclear energy and a reduction in energy consumption. As a result the swiss power grid has to face a series of challenges. The swiss power grid needs to be enhanced - for example to a smart grid - to be able to achieve the technical and political goals. Moreover the application of smart meters can help to achieve these goals. This bachelor thesis aims at showing the potential of smart meters for Switzerland's electricity market and at discussing the conflict of goals regarding data privacy when applying smart meters. On one hand the application of smart meters enables remote meter reading, giving households a detailed feedback about its electricity consumption, or the introduction of different tariffs. On the other hand there are several risks to consider when using smart meters. These risks concern mostly data privacy and data integrity. There exist various approaches to ensure data privacy and data integrity as good as possible. One approach, which is based on the insights gained in this bachelor thesis, is grounded on the concept of paying electricity before using it.

Assessing the average energy intensity of Internet transmissions is a complex task that has been a controversial subject of discussion. Estimates published over the last decade diverge by up to four orders of magnitude — from 0.0064 kilowatt-hours per gigabyte (kWh/GB) to 136 kWh/GB. This article presents a review of the methodological approaches used so far in such assessments: i) top–down analyses based on estimates of the overall Internet energy consumption and the overall Internet traffic, whereby average energy intensity is calculated by dividing energy by traffic for a given period of time, ii) model-based approaches that model all components needed to sustain an amount of Internet traffic, and iii) bottom–up approaches based on case studies and generalization of the results. Our analysis of the existing studies shows that the large spread of results is mainly caused by two factors: a) the year of reference of the analysis, which has significant influence due to efficiency gains in electronic equipment, and b) whether end devices such as personal computers or servers are included within the system boundary or not. For an overall assessment of the energy needed to perform a specific task involving the Internet, it is necessary to account for the types of end devices needed for the task, while the energy needed for data transmission can be added based on a generic estimate of Internet energy intensity for a given year. Separating the Internet as a data transmission system from the end devices leads to more accurate models and to results that are more informative for decision makers, because end devices and the networking equipment of the Internet usually belong to different spheres of control.

There has been a lot of research activity in the field of energy efficiency of ICT systems, which mainly focus on the hardware side, where the software aspects remained relatively unexplored. However software can influence the energy efficiency of hardware significantly, since all hardware is controlled by software. This bachelor thesis provides an overview of the most important problems and proposed solutions regarding the energy efficiency of software and to elucidate the software methodologies and designs that can be used to reduce energy demand of ICT systems, as well as describe diverse tools that assist in development of energy-efficient software.

In this thesis the model of a combined heating and cooling system is developed in order to assess potential energy and costs savings. The system has been modeled using the discrete event simulation paradigm, while the model has been implemented with the help of the Desmo-J (Discrete Event Simulation Modeling in Java) framework. The model flexibility allows to simulate very different scenarios, since a different parametrization can be applied to the heating and cooling system configuration, the control strategy used, the pricing model chosen as well as to the energy demands. Different experiments investigating the potential savings of using different price models and energy capacities of the system storages have been executed. The results show that the largest savings are reached by increasing the energy capacity of the waste heat storage and by the use of a spot market based pricing model.

"Smart" solutions have considerable transformational power. From the perspective of Environmental Informatics, it is an open question whether a specific smart solution (e.g., a smart home application) is more energy efficient than a conventional solution and under which conditions even a more energy efficient solution is more sustainable. This pa-per provides ideas and arguments why we should take a broader perspective in research and development, taking into account the life cycle of ICT products, the dynamics of economic systems, and emerging risks for basic rights, and how these challenges can be integrated into the research agenda of Environmental Informatics.

Newly developed materials such as engineered nanomaterials are produced in increasing amounts and applied in a growing number of products. Once released to the environment, they can pose a hazard to ecosystems and human health. To assess potential risks, the exposure of the material to humans and the environment has to be determined. For many materials such as engineered nanomaterials, a quantitative measurement of environmental concentrations is not feasible. Material flow models can be used to determine these concentrations indirectly by predicting material flows in the environment. Several modelling approaches can be applied to represent existing knowledge about the flows of materials into and between environmental media or compartments and to consider the uncertainty and variability of the input parameters. In this study we evaluate four existing approaches with regard to their capabilities for indirect exposure assessment, focusing on their ability to treat uncertainty. We first explain how we preselected the four most promising modelling approaches: material flow analysis, system dynamics, material flow networks, and probabilistic material flow modelling. We then define a set of evaluation criteria based on the requirements of environmental exposure assessment and develop a simplified example system that is designed to test these criteria. Based on the comparative modelling and implementation of the example system, we discuss the capabilities and limitations of the approaches and indicate what is missing for a reliable environmental exposure prediction using material flow modelling.

The development of smart grids makes possible the introduction of dynamic electricity rates, with prices changing each hour. Dynamic rates can reflect the temporal dependency of supply and demand for electrical power and network capacity, thus avoiding load peaks and promoting the use of fluctuating renewable energy sources. We present a simulation model that studies the electricity demand for heating and cooling modern office buildings in the context of dynamic electricity prices. The model permits the simulation of scenarios in which existing thermal energy reservoirs (warm and cold water tanks) are used for the smart grid integration by means of adapted control strategies. The adaptation to dynamic electricity rates – and thus indirectly to the fluctuating supply of wind and solar power – is achieved solely by changing the control of the existing infrastructure without changing the infrastructure itself.

The present thesis takes on the task of planning, designing and developing a marketplace system for the online platform uniboard.ch using the methodology Design Science Research and the Design Science Research Cycles Hevner et al. (2004) introduced. Initial situation was the existence of rudimentary solution for the users of the student community, which were able to sell there not anymore used goods, notably their compulsory literature of passed university courses. This solution was no suitable, long lasting solution because it lacked good usability and was based on the forum functionality. Using Hevners et al. (2004) provided method of the Design Science Research and the validation of the solution against the guidelines and checklist that were provided, the marketplace was developed successfully.

Due to the functionalities of the Internet and particularly of the Web 2.0 it is possible for people to work collaboratively in virtual space. Companies and individuals use this opportunity and post tasks on the Internet, that can then be solved by Internet users. This phenomenon, called Crowdsourcing, is increasingly used as a business model. This bachelor thesis addresses the motivation of people to work on Crowdsourcing tasks. The results show that different motivators exist for different types of Crowdsourcing. Depending on the type of the task, the ideology of the platform, the identification with the community, the remuneration and the type of collaboration, the motivation of the workers differs in its origin. On collaborative platforms like Wikipedia or Open Source Software it is mainly the common ideology and the strong identification with the community, that motivates the workers to contribute to a greater cause. On competitive platforms like InnoCentive, in contrast, the cash prizes, the career opportunities and the social recognition play the major roles. Tasks on Mechanical Turk are mostly solved for the remuneration. Crowdsourcing platforms with creative tasks motivate users to a great extent by giving them the chance to apply their creativity and expand their skills as well as establish their reputation and improve their career opportunities. Crowdsourcing applications in the form of online games are popular because the participants have fun playing the game and want to develop their player status.

The goal of this thesis is to analyse a log bucking simulation software and how its algorithm for finding optimal cut sequences could be improved. Problem solving methods as Greedy Algorithm and Dynamic Programming are discussed and then applied to the software. An evaluation of the new implementation with field data was able to show improvements in yield value and runtime performance.