Towards a Sustainable Architectural Design by an Adaptation of the Architectural Driven Design Method

Abstract

Sustainability is a global concern. It must be addressed by different sectors of society, even by the information technology sector. Moreover, such effort should not be only focused on direct impacts of technology over the environment, but also on the software engineering discipline by itself, which is facing now other dimensions of sustainability. In this paper, an adaptation of the Attribute-Driven Design method including sustainability as a driver is introduced. The proposal is based on sustainability guidelines established by the Karlskrona Manifesto. It involves a multidimensional sustainability analysis considering three levels of impacts and opportunities for each one of the architectural components. The adaptation is motivated by the design of a sustainable architecture of a cloud-based personal health record. The designed architecture is termed Health Catalogue Repository. It offers cloud services, allowing interoperability and timely access to patients’ clinical information. Energy consumption and resources optimization are contemplated like fundamental sustainability characteristics in the architectural design. The achieved design offers a better trade-off among quality attributes and sustainability constraints. The achieved design by using the proposal reduces the long-term impacts whilst increases the sustainability opportunities in architectural components.