Publication: March/April 2026
The energy footprint of software, software engineering, and software-intensive systems poses a significant concern.
Energy-hungry software-intensive systems, such as blockchain applications and cryptocurrencies, the pervasive integration and usage of central cloud and edge services and applications, along with AI-enabled systems, contribute to this issue. In addition, the global digital transformation of all industry sectors is accelerating the steep increase in software energy demands.
Green clean software pertains to the minimization of the energy needed to execute and use software-intensive systems. Adopting renewable energy resources to “feed” software execution is simply not enough, so reducing the carbon footprint must go hand in hand with minimizing the energy footprint.
The other way around, software-intensive systems may be used to support green processes that aim at reducing the environmental impact on the sector, society, and planet Earth. Examples include software supporting the production and consumption of renewable energy resources, smart software for green-oriented behavioral change (e.g., adopting green public transportation and sustainable work practices), and the combination of energy optimization and digitalization (so-called twin transition).
In addition, software sustainability from an environmental perspective may also concern software engineering and its processes: the energy used to develop, evolve, and maintain software-intensive systems is non-negligible and needs to be addressed.
This IEEE Software Special Theme issue aims to target both the green clean software, and the green through software dimensions, with special emphasis on the role played by green software engineering.
Possible topics:
- Practices and tactics for green clean software sustainability
- Green AI, AI for green
- Sustainability in data centers and high-performance computing
- Digital sufficiency
- Tradeoffs and balancing ecologic and technical software qualities
- Green clean software quality assessment
- Software sustainability by design
- Architecting for environmental sustainability
- Green quality metrics for software products and software engineering processes
- Standards, labels, indicators, and metrics for green clean software sustainability
- Sustainability reporting and the role of green clean software sustainability
- Green clean cloud and edge software
- Innovation, industrial adoption, and challenges related to green clean software sustainability
Submission Guidelines
For author information and guidelines on submission criteria, visit the IEEE Software Author Information page. Please submit papers through the IEEE Author Portal system, and be sure to select the special issue or special section name. Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Please submit only full papers intended for review, not abstracts, to the IEEE Author Portal. If requested, abstracts should be sent by email to the guest editors directly.
Questions? Contact the Lead Guest Editor at p.lago@vu.nl.
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- Patricia Lago (Lead Guest Editor), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
- Henry Muccini, University of L’Aquila, Italy
- Luis Cruz, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
- Eoin Woods, Endava, UK
