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including virtualisation and the cloud can be used for the realisation of the full
spectrum of benefits of a distributed intelligent power management systems [4], [5].
Alternative solutions might apply the bio-inspiration alongside new technique such as
cuckoo search. Generally, the application of ICT in intelligent systems for production
and consumption of energy has the following impacts and directions that have
provided the basis of the definition of key research questions:
Direct impact
: Consumption of energy and non-renewable resources in the ICT sector
and related products. How can a digital infrastructure materialised through software
and hardware system become greener through the application of a wide range of
methods as well as the new cloud computing paradigm? How could be minimised the
negative environmental impacts of obsolete equipment?
Enabling solution
: How can ICT reduce energy consumption in other sectors: using
video conferencing instead of travelling, home work place, intelligent traffic systems,
smart buildings, intelligent transportation management systems etc.? (as depicted in
figure 2)?
Systemic Approach
: Green ICT which generally, refers to the use of ICT resources in
an energy-efficient and cost-effective manner particularly applying cloud computing
and holistically analysed the resulted complex system. How can green ICT change the
way we live and work and resulting in substantially reducing the production and
consumption of energy? Is the social awareness through policies and regulations
enough explained and directed to easing environmental issue and urge conservation?
How is it possible to develop systems metrics and use them?
At the same time more often than before moving from pervasive ICT office/home
based applications to ICT as a utility is an obvious step forward. ICT as a utility or
utility computing should be simple, accessible and reliable appearing invisible and
providing easy and flexible access to computing resources that should be metered.
There are similarities with other utilities, but in order to achieve the foreseen vision of
IT becoming a utility (alongside water, gas, electricity, and telephone) different
computing platforms (e.g. grids) have been proposed and analysed particularly, by
Buyya et al. (2009) [6]. The full spectrum of consequences of achieving the vision of
ICT as a utility should require an analysis and definition of a research agenda, short
and long term challenges and a roadmap directed at providing recommendations for
future research, development, implementation, deployment and adoption. For
example, it should be considered that the use of ICT equipment especially obsolete is
energy consuming and an increasing share of the energy consumption is desirable.
Also recent studies demonstrated that carbon dioxide emissions from some data
centres are increasing.
This paper discusses the systemic relationships between ICT development,
pervasive support and the environmental issues with the main aim of defining a
realistic research agenda for the identification of the design solutions of an
environmentally friendly digital infrastructure for cloud or utility computing. The
application of the cloud computing model that uses the virtualisation feature is at the
core of this approach. Generally, virtualization is a technique for hiding the physical
characteristics of computing resources to simplify the way in which other systems,
applications, or end users interact with those resources. Virtualization, in essence is
the ability to emulate hardware via software and it is used in some computing
