-Sustainability is a major concern of our time. Companies can have a considerable negative impact on the environment, as their productive processes often contribute to the emission of greenhouse gases, generate toxic waste and consume natural resources. As such, they also have a great share of the responsibility towards our sustainable development. This paper presents a vision for a method to identify and mitigate unsustainable practices in business organisations. The method is inspired on the KAOS Framework, in the sense that it offers catalogues for the identification and resolution of obstacles to sustainability. The method will be complemented by a metamodel, a semi-structured language and a knowledge base, to eventually allow automation.
The negative impact of human activities are more
noticeable than ever. Companies productive processes can often
contribute to the emission of greenhouse gases, the excessive
consumption of natural resources and the generation of
waste. Sustainability is arguably in the strategic path of
many companies, but for decades their environmental,
social and governance activities have been disconnected from
this vision. Many companies still launch ad-hoc initiatives
simply to enhance their “green credentials”, to comply with
regulations or to deal with emergencies; rather than viewing
sustainability as something with a direct impact on their
business results [
Gradually, many companies are recognising this impact and the need to incorporate sustainability practices into their business. A 2016 survey [2] of 1,000 CEOS from 27 industries across 103 countries found that 89% of CEOs believe their commitment to sustainability translates into a real impact on their industries and the lack of short-term financial return is no longer a reason not to embrace sustainability. Consistent with this view, 85% of them claim to have incorporated sustainability into their business, even when they cannot quantify the benefits. While the survey observes that the CEOs are showing a growing understanding of sustainable development and are making deeper commitments to solve global challenges, it concludes that there is still room for improvement.
We argue that in order to contribute to our sustainable
development, companies need to understand which of their
practices negatively affect sustainability and to seek
alternatives or compensations for these practices. We will start
from the environmental dimension of sustainability [2] [
“How to identify practices in business operations that negatively affect the environmental sustainability and seek ways to mitigate these practices?”
This paper describes a vision for a method with this very
purpose. The method is inspired by the well-known KAOS
Framework, a goal-oriented modelling technique in
Requirements Engineering [
The paper is organised as follows: Section 1 motivates our work; Section 2 summarises the most important concepts
Copyright c 2019 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). that inspired our vision; Section 3 describes our envisioned solution; and finally, Section 4 concludes the paper.
This section briefly explains fundamental concepts related to our vision: sustainability, goal-oriented requirements engineering and sustainability models/metamodels.
Sustainability is a complex and interdisciplinary concept
that has been defined in many ways. Yet, the term can be
essentially understood as the “ability to endure” [
Sustainability is composed of several dimensions. The
three best known are environmental, social and economic,
often referred as the three pillars of sustainability. However,
other dimensions start to be considered; such as the human
and the technical [
However, in order for sustainability to be effectively achieved, other dimensions must also be considered. We believe that analogous solutions to the one described here can be developed for the remaining dimensions.
Goal-oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) has emerged as an attempt to solve many of the problems of traditional requirements engineering, including incorrect assumptions about the environment, the little attention given to understanding the need for a particular system and to whether its specifications really captured the needs of stakeholders [9]. Therefore, GORE encompasses the elicitation, assessment, design, structuring, documentation, and analysis of software requirements [9]. There are several approaches and methodologies that enable its application.
The KAOS is a well-known GORE framework, whose
acronym means "Keep All Objectives Satisfied". KAOS is
composed of a modeling language and a method for
developing software requirements. The most important KAOS
concepts for our vision are: agent, goal, obstacle, resolution
and goal-obstacle analysis. These concepts are explained
below [
An agent is an active component of the system that plays a role in meeting a goal. Agents can be humans, devices, software, etc; they perform operations assigned to them. A goal is a prescriptive statement of intent that a system must meet through the collaboration of its agents. Goals range from high-level business goals, whose satisfaction requires the cooperation of multiple agents (e.g., "Maximize [Profit]", to low-level technical goals, whose satisfaction depends on a single agent (e.g. “Achieve[Calculated Product Tax]”).
In a goal model, goals are organised into AND / OR
refinement structures. An AND refinement connects a goal
to a subset of goals, i.e. the goal will only be satisfied if
all its children are satisfied. An OR refinement connects
a goal with an alternative set of refinements, i.e. the goal
will be met if at least one of the refinements is met. The
KAOS Framework draws attention to the fact that often the
goal model is initially developed in an “idealized” way.
That is, it fails to consider exceptional conditions in the
application domain that may violate these goals. To build a
more realistic model, the KAOS Framework defines
goalobstacle analysis. This analysis takes a pessimistic view of
the elaborated model seeking to identify exceptional
conditions (obstacles) and ways to mitigate them (resolutions).
Therefore, an obstacle is a situation that, if occur, can
prevent a goal from being satisfied. Thus, every obstacle
generated needs to be solved in one way or another [
There are currently sustainability models that help to incorporate sustainability into organisations and/or systems. Some of them are summarised below:
Cabot et al. [
Stefan et al. [
engineering techniques to describe requirements that seek minimal environmental impact. Their work aims to provide insight into how sustainability requirements can be discovered, what existing tools or techniques can facilitate this task, and what their limitations are in this regard.
model for software development projects that breaks down sustainability into its environmental, human, social, economic and technical dimensions. The model provides a series of activities and relates them to the values they support and the indicators against which they can be evaluated.
Models, such as Cabot et al.’s , Mahaux et al.’s and Stefan and Letier’s , are specific to the problem they seek to solve and cannot be used as a reference for business organisations in general. Penzenstadler and Femmer’s model, on the other hand, seeks to be more generic and, although designed for software development companies, can be adapted to business processes in general.
In order to position themselves as sustainable businesses, companies need to routinely analyse their own practices to identify opportunities to become more sustainable. We envision a method to allow companies to recognise unsustainable practices in business operations and to modify, replace or compensate them with alternative practices.
The method is inspired by the goal-obstacle analysis of the KAOS Framework. Therefore, we refer to the aforementioned harmful practices as sustainability obstacles and to the alternative practices as sustainability resolutions. We extended the KAOS Framework to define these concepts as:
A sustainability goal is a prescriptive statement of intent that contributes to a long-term positive impact on one or more sustainability dimensions. That is, just like in KAOS, a goal is something that needs to be achieved, but in this case, it also needs to have a long-term positive impact on one or more sustainability dimensions.
A sustainability goal is a prescriptive statement of intent that contributes to a long-term positive impact on one or more sustainability dimensions. That is, just like in KAOS, a goal is something that needs to be achieved, but in this case, it also needs to have a long-term positive impact on one or more sustainability dimensions.
tion for the non-satisfaction of a sustainability goal. That is, an obstacle is a situation that occurs that prevents a goal from being reached.
alleviate or avoid a particular sustainability obstacle.
In a simplified example, a company may have high-level goals such as "Maximize[Environmental sustainability]" and lower-level goals like "Reduce[Carbon emissions from product delivery]". In KAOS, a goal-obstacle analysis would first negate the goal (e.g. "NOT Reduce[Carbon emissions from product delivery])" to then find obstacles that lead to the negated goal. So, an obstacle could be “Delivery car consumes diesel” and a possible resolution could be: “Achieve[Product delivery by bike]”, as shown in Figure 1.
Similar to KAOS, we envision a method that identifies unsustainable practices from a sustainability obstacle catalogue and potential mitigation strategies from a sustainability resolution catalogue. We also envision the semiautomation of this process through the definition of a metamodel, a semi-structured language, rules and a knowledge base.
Therefore, the method will have the following elements, whose relationship is represented in Figure 2. These are described below:
sustainability concepts that underlie the solution.
obstacle and resolution catalogues, of the language
and rules that describes them, and of the
knowledge base. We envision that the metamodel will
have elements such as "goal", "obstacle",
"resolution", "agent", "resource", "environmental impact".
We intend to extend the work of Penzenstadler and
Femmer [
listing possible environmental problems resulting from common company practices. The catalogue will help to identify the obstacles to sustainable business operations. At least two types of obstacles will be covered: "pollution" and "resource scarcity". The former will be concerned with obstacles that contribute to different types of pollution (including water, air and soil), while the latter refers to the scarcity of natural resources.
generic, will detail different alternatives to solve or mitigate sustainability obstacles. The catalogue will contain, among other things, alternative resolutions for generic obstacles and concrete examples of such resolutions.
A semi-structured language and rules will describe sustainability obstacles and resolutions, as well as rules to automate the resolution search. We envision that the language will not only formalise the description of sustainability obstacles and resolutions, but will also make it easier to identify them through the use of a knowledge base. The language will also facilitate the understanding and the communication of sustainability obstacle and resolutions, as everyone involved understands the meaning of the concepts.
A knowledge base will be created for different industries to allow the automatic identification and resolution of sustainability obstacles, possibly using predicate logic and Prolog.
Sustainability has become a major concern for the
society. Large companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple
have been criticised for not prioritising sustainable practices,
such as the use of energy efficient data centres [
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie SkłodowskaCurie grant agreement No 712949 (TECNIOspring PLUS) and from the Agency for Business Competitiveness of the Government of Catalonia.