Solenix

World Environment Day is the United Nations Day for encouraging worldwide awareness and action to protect our environment.

At Solenix we are committed to contributing to global sustainability and the recent collaboration with Otto Kaaij, a committed Student and teaching assistant of Computer Science at TU Delft, marks a significant step in this direction. Otto is pursuing his master’s thesis in Sustainable Software Engineering and will evaluate MUST (Mission Utility and Support Tools) from a sustainable and green software engineering perspective over the coming months.

Otto’s journey to writing his Master’s thesis in this field is inspiring. He explains, "I studied science communication for a semester and learned about the ways science and society influence each other. I also learned how to effectively communicate scientific ideas. I ended up studying sustainable software after my journey to find a thesis subject explicitly aligned with something I think will make the world a better place."

IT systems currently account for 2-6% of global energy consumption. Future estimates vary, but it is generally expected that this figure will not decrease. While hardware is often blamed for this energy use, it is important to recognize that the demand for hardware is driven by software requirements. The aim of the thesis is to contribute to addressing this issue and finding sustainable solutions. 

“For example, by figuring out how to effectively measure energy consumption and how to create effective, sensible sustainability requirements for space software, we can start sharing tools and processes with software developers and other space industry actors and agencies."

Otto offers two key pieces of advice for software engineers:

1. Sustainable software is inherently better software, leading to more efficient, maintainable, and stable projects.
2. Small changes can have a significant impact, so it’s important to be mindful of the climate impact of your choices, even if you’re not in meetings explicitly about sustainability.

Luís Cruz, Assistant Professor at TU Delft and expert in Sustainable Software Engineering, Green AI is positive about this collaboration: "By collaborating with Solenix, we have a unique opportunity to bridge the gap between real-world challenges and the latest advancements in energy-efficient software engineering". 

When asked about the main goals of this work, Luís adds: "Our mission is twofold: firstly, to reduce the carbon footprint of space operations software at Solenix, and secondly, to generalize our findings to benefit the entire software industry. Ultimately, our goal is to make green software a standard practice across the board".

José da Silva, a Team Manager at Solenix is supervising the thesis on Solenix's behalf. According to José, Solenix is focused on three key objectives:

1. Enhancing the academic success and scientific contributions of Otto’s research.
2. Establishing strong collaboration with all stakeholders, including Otto and TU Delft.
3. Expanding expertise in Green and Sustainable Software Engineering to tackle socially impactful challenges and inspire customers.

José added "This collaboration is expected to provide valuable insights that will shape the design of our projects and products. Otto's thesis will focus on MUST where more direct insights are expected. I would like to express my gratitude to Luis Cruz for his commitment to this collaboration and extend my best wishes to Otto for a successful thesis."

We are very excited to see how the collaboration will develop and of course, we are looking forward to seeing the results!