How to Achieve Sustainable Mobility Using Sustainable Software Development

Should the code be green?

Sustainable Mobility is the key goal for today and future vehicle manufacturers and mobility providers. Reducing the CO2 footprint of transportation contributes to building a better future for all of us. For the automotive industry, part of this goal is defined in the European Vehicle Emission Standards initiative, Euro 7 being the latest norm before all cars become fully zero-emission.

There are multiple paths leading into zero-emission transportation, most of which are being taken in parallel. Electric vehicles, especially charged using renewable energy sources such as solar energy. Fuel cells and hydrogen vehicles. Using recycled materials for both car interior and exterior. Car sharing, better urban transportation, and all kinds of initiatives leading to reducing the number of vehicles on the roads.

How software development companies can help us achieve sustainable mobility

Of course, software development companies can help with these kinds of initiatives by building software platforms for electric vehicles, efficient charging, and navigating to charging stations using renewable energy or making sure supply chains are fully invested in reducing CO2 emissions.

But is there anything, in general, we can do, or at least think about, to make software development more environment-aware?

One important aspect is the computational complexity of the code. More operations, assuming the same hardware, require more energy. This is especially important these days, as the microprocessors availability has become a huge bottleneck for the automotive industry. How can we mitigate this problem? Let’s look at two possibilities.

Building software for sustainable mobility with green coding

Firstly, does the programming language or code quality matter? Yes and yes. Let’s start by looking at the Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages paper from 2017 comparing the energy efficiency of programming languages (the lower, the better):

We can see that switching to a lower-level language can improve energy consumption. Is this the answer to the problem? Not directly. Procedural, statically typed languages are, in general, faster and have lower energy consumption, but at the same time are more complicated and require more time to write the same amount of code in easier to use ones. This is not a hard rule, as we can see Java gets a great result, although probably after optimizations.

Choosing energy-efficient computing resources

So one thing we can do is to think about the efficiency of the language when we choose the tech stack for our project. The other thing regarding the same problem is to optimize the code instead of adding more cores or GBs of memory – as it may be a cheaper solution initially.

The other improvement we can make comes to leveraging shared resources in the cloud for computation by building multi-layer computing systems, where results required immediately or in real-time can be computed on edge devices, while others can be computed at the edge of the cloud or in distributed cloud systems. Having those three layers, where two of them share resources between multiple vehicles or end-user devices, makes the computation both more cost-effective and requires less energy, as the bill is shared between multiple users.

Developers and software development departments can contribute to making the sustainable mobility goal achievable in the near future. Small steps and decisions regarding programming languages, frameworks, computing resources make a difference.