An integrated method for environmental assessment and ecodesign of ICT-based optimization services

Abstract

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) enable the creation of optimization services, defined in this paper as services aimed at providing information to improve the operation of a system, for example in terms of cost or environmental efficiency. On one hand, these services may help to avoid impacts; on the other hand, they use ICT, which are impact-intensive technologies. Consequently, the impact reductions they allow must at least balance the impacts generated by the ICT infrastructures they rely on. This article provides an integrated framework for assessing the environmental impacts and for supporting the design of environmentally-sound ICT-based optimization services. The framework relies on an environmental model of information and a comprehensive ecodesign method considering three levels of analysis: equipment, infrastructure and information. The framework introduced is applied to the ecodesign of an optimization service for urban waste collection based on a city-scale wireless sensor network.