UCL Doctorate Training Centre in Urban Sustainability & Resilience
http://engd-usar.cege.ucl.ac.uk/

Project: Self-Managed Services for Sustainability
Industrial Partner: Logica

Sustainability management systems are critical enabling technologies to help addressing many of the challenges of urban sustainability and resilience. These systems help organisations collect and make sense of large volume of data concerning a range of sustainability indicators related notably to energy, travel, waste and water. The information provided by these systems is used to inform strategic policy and engineering decisions for sustainability, monitor the impact of such decisions, and revise them if needed. The quality and trustworthiness of the information they provide are therefore highly critical.

Developing and managing such systems require significant expertise and resources. They are usually provided as managed services to client organisations that thereby rely on external expertise in sustainability management. Logica has a long experience in providing such services. It notably helps the United Nations in collecting carbon emissions at the country level and helps several governmental bodies and multinational companies in monitoring a wide range of sustainability indicators, using amongst other solutions its own Sustainability Indicator Reporting Application (SIRA).

Sustainability management systems serve different purposes in different context. A critical task in providing sustainability management services is to help organisations define what their sustainability objectives are, how they will be measured, what information would be relevant for making effective decisions with respect to these objectives, and how to collect the vast amount of data needed to obtain reliable and accurate information in what can be a highly political context. There is no single solution that fits all purposes in all contexts. Political and social factors are as important as technical ones. Managing sustainability services also requires rapid adaptation to changes. These include changes in legislations, evolving definitions of sustainability indicators, continuous changes in organisation’s practices and data formats, changing attitudes of people towards the system, as well as low-level failures in the computing infrastructure. Dealing with these changes requires a continuous adaptation of the sustainability services so that they remain fit for purpose as the context evolves.

The aim of this project are (1) to investigate the fundamental principles for the design of sustainability management systems and (2) to develop an innovative architecture model of sustainability management system that will provide a flexible and largely autonomous way of managing services for sustainability in response to contextual changes.

The fundamental design principles will cover the design of the whole socio-technical system of which the software system is only a part. These principles will investigate how to help organisations define adequate sustainability goals, how to derive from such goals what information should be provided to decision-makers, and how to collect the necessary data in a cost-effective way to provide accurate and trustworthy information. The development of these principles will be based on the latest research in systems requirements engineering for the design of complex, large-scale socio-technical systems.

The architecture model will be build on the principle of requirements reflection which allows a system to be made aware of, and reason about its own requirements (including who its stakeholders are, what their goals are, the interdependencies between these goals, and what domain assumptions the system relies upon). This allows the system to implement a supervisory control loop on its requirements, architecture, and services delivery mechanisms. The system will therefore collect information about its environment and service delivery, assess how well its method of service delivery satisfies stakeholders’ goals, decide whether and how to modify such methods in order to improve goals’ satisfaction, and act on such decisions by tuning or modifying its behaviour and parameters.

The design principles and self-managed architecture will be developed and validated by studying and contributing to the sustainability management practices at Logica and UCL. In addition to helping uncovering general principles, this will contribute to understanding how to measure and manage sustainability more specifically in the IT consultancy and university sectors, respectively.

STUDENT BACKGROUND:

- A bachelor degree (1st or 2.1 honours) in computer science or related field. An MSc in software engineering or related area is desirable.
- Excellent abstraction and programming skills
- Excellent communication and presentation skills
- Experience in requirements engineering and system design is desirable

Informal enquiries on the project can be made to Emmanuel Letier (e.letier@cs.ucl.ac.uk)

HOW TO APPLY: http://engd-usar.cege.ucl.ac.uk/

CLOSING DATE: The closing date for applications is 20th April 2010.  Interviews will be held in late April/early May. 

FEES fully paid and STIPEND of £18,247 tax-free p.a. 

START DATE: 27 September 2010 for 4-years full time (no part time option available).