Abstract :
The articles in this special section focus on computational sustainability. The growing field of sustainability science and technology focuses on the design of products, processes, and services to meet economic and societal needs with minimal impact on the global ecosystem. An important emerging area of sustainability science is to develop computational models, methods and tools for decision making for a broad range of sustainability related applications such as conservation of natural resources and ecosystem, enhancing human health and well-being, minimizing impact of human activities on the environment, intelligent management and conservation of scarce resources, reducing impact of disasters, managing stress on urban infrastructures, e c. Solutions to these sustainability problems often depend on advances in computational areas, including optimization, modeling, data management and analytics, advanced sensing techniques, human computer interaction, and intelligent systems. The sustainability of computing itself is an important topic of concern and relates to effective management of energy consumption, operation under energy constraints, and dealing with environmental impact of rapid obsolescence of electronic devices and systems. The computational sustainability is woven into many areas, including system design, computer architecture, programming language, compilers, networking, etc.
