Lifecycle modeling for the eco design of the Internet of Things

Quisbert-Trujillo, Ernesto; Ernst, Thomas; Samuel, Karine Evrard; Cor, Emmanuelle; Monnier, Elise

doi:10.1016/j.procir.2020.02.120

Cited by 10 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…3b). Contrary to our preliminary assumptions presented in our previous work [11], its electronic card lacks of MCU and memory components. Because of that, it is believed that the device uses at least the embedded microprocessor of the System-on-Chip (SoC) subcomponent of its LoRa module to manage processing and transmissions tasks; and at least its embedded memory, to keep transitory data and metering con guration settings.…”

Section: Case Studycontrasting

confidence: 70%

“…This work develops this approach to highlight its relevance for impact estimation and eco design of the Internet of Things. It extends an initial design standpoint outlined in [11], and it has the following structure. section 2 presents the related work that help to understand our posture, and recalls our previous framework, which will be later implemented in section 3.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An approach for comprehensive Life Cycle Assessment and effective eco design of IoT systems: data-driven modeling of reference flows

Quisbert-Trujillo,

Morfouli

2023

Preprint

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As we approach the limits of our technologies and the number of connected devices grows, scientists put more efforts to estimate and reduce the ecological damage of the Internet of Things. Unfortunately, environmental studies and eco design of IoT systems suffer from a major inconvenience so far: it does not put sensor data in the focus of attention. This paper aims to point out explicitly the essential role of this aspect for modeling reference flows and demonstrate its relevance for agile environmental assessment and sustainable design. Also, it aims to illustrate that such modeling process must happen in a comprehensive way. For this, our work relies on a case study addressing smart metering, and we proceed as follows. Based on available documentation and inspired by certain aspects of different technologies, we imagine the maximal capacities of key components, and we construct an unfavorable data flow scenario to get a rough idea of the reference flow and the long-term impact of our system during its use phase. Results from this procedure are later contrasted with results obtained from a packet traffic analysis, in which local and internet data flow are examined carefully. At the end, we verify the importance of data empirically, and we conclude that the reference flow and the impact contributors of a system could be affected not only by the local data transit but also by the complex interactions between edge devices and cloud resources. All our findings are discussed to produce generic guidelines for sustainable IoT systems.

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Section: Case Studycontrasting

confidence: 70%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An approach for comprehensive Life Cycle Assessment and effective eco design of IoT systems: data-driven modeling of reference flows

Quisbert-Trujillo,

Morfouli

2023

Preprint

Self Cite

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“…Argentina is a developing country with strong environmental regulation but a patchy environment which results in an important number of offenders [61,62]. There is also an environmentally aware population [63] and flourishing eco-entrepreneurship with pro-active practices [64,65]. Early research [56,66] identified several of the pro-environmental discourses analyzed in the paper.…”

Section: Sample and Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Characteristics Do the Firms Have That Go Beyond Compliance with Regulation in Environmental Protection? A Multiple Discriminant Analysis

Vázquez‐Brust

Plaza-Úbeda

2021

Sustainability

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This paper is focused on analyzing the characteristics of firms that have environmental performance beyond the requirements of regulation in environmental protection. To identify such characteristics, we propose a value and context model building on environmental paradigms as conceptualized by Dryzek’s environmental discourse theory. Using multiple discriminant analysis (MDA) to analyze data collected from a multi-respondent survey of Argentinean polluting firms, we identify distinctive characteristics of firms going beyond regulation and firms that do not comply with regulation. In particular, comparing with other five environmental discourses, endorsement of green growth is evaluated in its connection with compliance patterns. We find that supporting green growth discourse (also known as ecological modernization) is one of the characteristics of those firms that go beyond compliance in their environmental performance.

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“…This is supported by existing LCA of ICT devices [Ercan et al, 2016] showing that the production of electronic components accounts for a major part of the environmental impacts, especially for battery-powered devices. However, very few LCA results are available for IoT edge devices, thus preventing an objective comparison between direct burdens and positive enabling effects [Gray, 2018, Quisbert-Trujillo et al, 2020, Hittinger and Jaramillo, 2019. Furthermore, the task is even more difficult as IoT gathers heterogeneous designs for many different applications, which challenges systematic LCA studies and comparisons.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It requires minimizing (i) the embodied energy and carbon footprint of the WSN production, (ii) the ecotoxicity of the WSN e-waste, and (iii) the Internet traffic associated to the generated data. The challenge of eco-design in the IoT and the complexity of shared infrastructures is pointed out in [Quisbert-Trujillo et al, 2020]. The authors argue that the life-cycle model of an IoT system should include the modeling of sensing, edge and cloud devices together with a representation of the hardware components.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the embodied carbon footprint of IoT edge devices with a bottom-up life-cycle approach

Pirson,

Bol

2021

Preprint

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In upcoming years, the number of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices is expected to surge up to tens of billions of physical objects. However, while the IoT is often presented as a promising solution to tackle environmental challenges, the direct environmental impacts generated over the life cycle of the physical devices are usually overlooked. It is implicitly assumed that their environmental burden is negligible compared to the positive impacts they can generate. Yet, because IoT calls for a massive deployment of electronic devices in the environment, life-cycle assessment (LCA) is an essential tool to leverage in order to avoid further increasing the stress on our planet. Some general LCA methodologies for IoT already exist but quantitative results are still scarce. In this paper, we present a parametric framework based on hardware profiles to evaluate the cradle-to-gate carbon footprint of IoT edge devices. We exploit our framework in three ways. First, we apply it on four use cases to evaluate their respective production carbon footprint. Then, we show that the heterogeneity inherent to IoT edge devices must be considered as the production carbon footprint between simple and complex devices can vary by a factor of more than 150×. Finally, we estimate the absolute carbon footprint induced by the worldwide production of IoT edge devices through a macroscopic analysis over a 10-year period. Results range from 22 to 562 MtCO2-eq/year in 2027 depending on the deployment scenarios. However, the truncation error acknowledged for LCA bottom-up approaches usually lead to an undershoot of the environmental impacts. We compared the results of our use cases with the few reports available from Google and Apple, which suggest that our estimates could be revised upwards by a factor around 2× to compensate for the truncation error. Worst-case scenarios in 2027 would therefore reach more than 1000 MtCO2-eq/year. This truly stresses the necessity to consider environmental constraints when designing and deploying IoT edge devices.

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Lifecycle modeling for the eco design of the Internet of Things

Cited by 10 publications

References 24 publications

An approach for comprehensive Life Cycle Assessment and effective eco design of IoT systems: data-driven modeling of reference flows

An approach for comprehensive Life Cycle Assessment and effective eco design of IoT systems: data-driven modeling of reference flows

What Characteristics Do the Firms Have That Go Beyond Compliance with Regulation in Environmental Protection? A Multiple Discriminant Analysis

Assessing the embodied carbon footprint of IoT edge devices with a bottom-up life-cycle approach

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