Sustainable IT Ecosystems: Enabling Next-Generation Cities

 Sustainable IT Ecosystems: Enabling Next-Generation Cities Christopher E. Hoover, Ratnesh K. Sharma, Brian J. Watson, Susan K. Charles, Amip J. Shah, Chandrakant D. Patel, Manish Marwah, Thomas W. Christian, Cullen E. Bash HP Laboratories HPL-2010-73 sustainability, cities, sustainable it ecosystems, ecosystems, life cycle, microgrid, water, power, analytics, control theory, autonomous control, pervasive sensing, design In this paper, we describe an integrated design and management approach for building next-generation cities. This approach leverages IT technology in both the design and operational phases to optimize sustainability over a broad set of metrics while lowering costs. We call this approach a Sustainable IT Ecosystem. Our approach is based on five principles: ecosystem-scale life-cycle design; scalable and configurable infrastructure building blocks; pervasive sensing; data analytics and visualization; and autonomous control. Application of the approach is demonstrated for two case studies: an urban water infrastructure and an urban power microgrid. We conclude by discussing future opportunities to co-design and integrate these independent infrastructures, gaining further efficiencies. External Posting Date: July 6, 2010 [Fulltext] Approved for External Publication Internal Posting Date: July 6, 2010 [Fulltext] Copyright 2010 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. Sustainable IT Ecosystems: Enabling Next-Generation Cities Authors Christopher E. Hoover*, Ratnesh K. Sharma, Brian J. Watson*, Susan K. Charles, Amip J. Shah*, Chandrakant D. Patel, Manish Marwah, Thomas W. Christian, and Cullen E. Bash *Member, IEEE, Fellow, IEEE Abstract In this paper, we describe an integrated design and management approach for building next-generation cities. This approach leverages IT technology in both the design and operational phases to optimize sustainability over a broad set of metrics while lowering costs. We call this approach a Sustainable IT Ecosystem. Our approach is based on five principles: ecosystem-scale life-cycle design; scalable and configurable infrastructure building blocks; pervasive sensing; data analytics and visualization; and autonomous control. Application of the approach is demonstrated for two case studies: an urban water infrastructure and an urban power microgrid. We conclude by discussing future opportunities to co-design and integrate these independent infrastructures, gaining further efficiencies.In this paper, we describe an integrated design and management approach for building next-generation cities. This approach leverages IT technology in both the design and operational phases to optimize sustainability over a broad set of metrics while lowering costs. We call this approach a Sustainable IT Ecosystem. Our approach is based on five principles: ecosystem-scale life-cycle design; scalable and configurable infrastructure building blocks; pervasive sensing; data analytics and visualization; and autonomous control. Application of the approach is demonstrated for two case studies: an urban water infrastructure and an urban power microgrid. We conclude by discussing future opportunities to co-design and integrate these independent infrastructures, gaining further efficiencies. Introduction The United Nations has estimated that about half of the world’s population, 3.3 billion people, live in cities and towns, and projects that this figure will increase to nearly 5 billion people (60% of world population) by 2030 [WUrbnPr]. This growth in urban population will require the creation of new cities, and re-creation of existing cities around the globe. This new physical infrastructure will require significant amounts of materials and energy for construction and operation. The resulting risk to the carrying capacity of the biosphere – including threats of climate change and growing scarcity of water, food, and fuel – necessitates a new approach to the design of cityscale infrastructures. This new approach must result in designs that emphasize the least and most appropriate use of resources such as material, energy, and water for construction and operation, while maintaining or improving the quality of life for urban populations. Unlike the previous generation of cities built during the Industrial Age, next generation cities will be able to leverage current information technology (IT). We can now use IT, specifically computer-aided design, to optimize the design of new cities. What’s more, we can embed information and communication technology into everything within a new city to achieve optimal operation of city-scale infrastructure. Researchers, city planners, and others have been working on such concepts as intelligent cities and spaces [IntSpace], as well as the integration of computing and sensing technologies with the physical world [PhyCSys], [PhyPNet]. Yet we still lack a concise framework for achieving optimal integration of IT into the design and operation of physical infrastructure. This paper introduces the concept of a sustainable IT ecosystem as one that employs key elements of information technology to improve the sustainability of compatible ecosystems. We apply this concept to the physical infrastructures that form the next-generation city ecosystem and introduce a framework that provides a more sustainable alternative to conventional physical infrastructures. Five principles comprise the framework: 1. Ecosystem-scale life-cycle design; 2. Scalable and configurable infrastructure building blocks; 3. Pervasive sensing; 4. Data analytics and visualization; and 5. Autonomous control. As shown in Figure {CITY2ARCH}, our framework applies these principles across urban infrastructure functions. Using the same architecture in the design and management of all the different infrastructure components of a city provides the opportunity to take advantage of interdependencies, while potentially eliminating many inefficiencies and redundancies. Such an approach has been previously reported to improve the sustainability of large-scale IT infrastructures, such as data centers [IntDSDC]. In this work, we describe how these principles can be applied to city-scale infrastructures. Ecosystem-scale Life-cycle Design A critical challenge in creating sustainable IT ecosystems will be ensuring that choices made at design time do not result in detrimental effects downstream during the life-cycle. Life-cycle assessment (LCA) provides a useful approach in such Design for Environment (DfE). The notion of LCA is not new [HitchLCA] [ISO14064]; it has been successfully applied for many decades in various fields. Traditional LCA approaches have involved building detailed inventories of unit processes and products flowing across the entire life-cycle – from extraction of raw materials and manufacturing through distribution and retail to operation and end of life. Having aggregated these inventories through proxy indicators [Env6Meth] such as mass, energy, or exergy consumption of unit processes and products, standardized or documented impact factors can then be applied across the inventory to obtain the environmental impact along a multitude of impact categories [Imp2002], [EcoInd99]. Many off-the-shelf software packages [SimaPro]–[EcoLCA] are available for implementing LCA. Unfortunately, most of these LCA approaches are focused on productor system-scale implementation (on the order of hundreds to thousands of components) using standard assessment methodologies. To create sustainable IT ecosystems, more advanced design tools that enable a higher degree of hybridization in LCA will be required; such tools will also need to deliver improved validation, rapidity and scale to the design methodologies. Such hybridization may include a combination of streamlined methodologies [StreamLCA], economic input-output techniques [EnvLCAIO], traditional process LCA [ISO14064], object-based modeling [ThermoOOA], and other approaches including Design of Experiment techniques [FundDesExp] along with innovations in computational LCA approaches [CompLCA]. Once successfully integrated, such a toolkit would provide designers with a multi-stage, layered approach that allows an initial narrowing of the design space into discrete subsets of parameters, whose resolution is then gradually increased for the most sensitive objects as the size of the design space is expanded. While the analytical and computational complexity of such an approach previously prohibited its widespread deployment, we have now reached a point where IT infrastructure and methods – including software development, programming techniques, and computational hardware – enable large-scale analysis and design exploration using commodity systems. By using technology to create a library of domain-specific methodologies and metrics, an integrated approach for ecosystem-scale life-cycle design can be achieved, and be applied to the use of IT in urban