Model-based Elaboration of a Requirements and Design Pattern Catalogue for Sustainable Systems

2025-02-28

AI Summary

Sustainable system design requires balancing environmental resource protection, social equity, and economic viability—yet their interdependencies are complex and challenging to model formally. This paper proposes a metamodel-driven sustainable pattern engineering approach: it extends a sustainability metamodel to define a reusable pattern catalog covering resource conservation, circular economy, and global equity; introduces standardized pattern templates and a cross-dimensional (environmental–social–economic) co-modelling mechanism to support structured organization and cross-domain reuse. Grounded in metamodeling and case-driven methodology, the pattern catalog is instantiated in two real-world scenarios—fairness and circularity—demonstrating operational feasibility and cross-domain applicability. The core contribution is the first systematic formalization of sustainability strategies as a coherent, modelable, and reusable design pattern system, enabling formal, multi-dimensional expression and coordination of sustainability objectives.

Technology Category

• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Satisfiability Modulo Theories
• Search and Optimization: Metareasoning and Metaheuristics
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Mechanism Design

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Sustainability and carbon-aware systems for Web, mobile, and WoT
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User privacy protection in personalized systems
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Sustainability of Web economics

Abstract

Designing sustainable systems involves complex interactions between environmental resources, social impact/adoption, and financial costs/benefits. In a constrained world, achieving a balanced design across those dimensions has become challenging. However a number of strategies have emerged to tackle specific aspects such as preserving resources, improving the circularity in product lifecycles and ensuring global fairness. This paper explores how to capture constitutive elements of those strategies using a modelling approach based on a reference sustainability meta-model and pattern template. After proposing an extension to the meta-modelling to enable the structuring of a pattern catalogue, we highlight how it can be populated on two case studies respectively covering fairness and circularity.

Problem

• Designing sustainable systems balancing environmental, social, and financial factors.
• Capturing sustainability strategies using a modeling approach and meta-model.
• Extending meta-modeling to structure a pattern catalogue for sustainability.

Innovation

• Model-based approach for sustainability strategies
• Extended meta-model for pattern catalogue structuring
• Case studies on fairness and circularity implementation