A case study of environmental considerations and opportunities in cyber physical systems

Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) are becoming more ubiquitous, complex and powerful as well as more and more present in our daily life. The inherent benefit and comfort come with an environmental impact at every step of their life-cycle. This impact is significant and unfortunately often ignored today. As cyber-physical systems tend to be ‘invisible’, there is a need for awareness of the underlying infrastructure and required resources, early in the design phases. In this article, the environmental impact considerations in the early stages of the implementation and opportunities to improve design choices with a people-planet-system perspective are discussed. The authors discuss the aspects related to system configuration, data management and the overall goal and functionalities supported by the CPS. Through a specific smart home case, the potential of considering life-cycle assessment of both the devices and data management is illustrated. By explicitly considering different configurations, it will be possible to analyse the environmental impacts of the design decisions. Our research in progress targets a design approach to converge into an equilibrium between utility, performance, and minor environmental impact of smart systems.