Exploring Automated Reduction of the Carbon Footprint of Webpages
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Typ
Examensarbete för masterexamen
Master's Thesis
Master's Thesis
Program
Software engineering and technology (MPSOF), MSc
Publicerad
2023
Författare
Lyu, Haozhou
Modellbyggare
Tidskriftstitel
ISSN
Volymtitel
Utgivare
Sammanfattning
An increasing number of people around the world have become concerned about climate change in recent years. With the increasing popularity and ubiquity of software, the ICT (Information Communication Technology) industry is an increasingly important contributor to climate change—and has the potential to significantly contribute to controlling climate change as well. In the ICT industry, software contributes a significant portion of the carbon footprint of the industry. Therefore, it would be beneficial to take measures to reduce the carbon footprint associated with software development.
This thesis explores developers’ existing opinions, knowledge, and practices with regard to carbon footprint and energy consumption. It also explores the automated reduction of carbon footprint as well, with a particular focus on webpages. Semi-structured interviews and a survey were conducted to identify the requirements that automated reduction tools must meet to ensure adoption. These requirements guided the creation of a genetic programming-based tool to automatically reduce the carbon footprint of webpages.
We compared the performance of this tool to two main baselines—the original webpage and randomly generated changes. The automated carbon footprint reduction tool can reduce the carbon footprint of webpages, yielding significantly lower quantities of transferred data, page load time, and memory usage than both baselines. Our findings offer a foundation for future research on practices, guidelines, and automated tools that address software’s carbon footprint.
Beskrivning
Ämne/nyckelord
Carbon footprint , Genetic programming , Software engineering , Case study , Thematic analysis , Web development