Energy Analysis of Services through Green Metrics: Towards Green Certificates

Energy-awareness in services can be obtained through annotations regarding energy consumption. In this paper, annotations are given as Green Performance Indicators (GPIs). A service is annotated in terms of its structure, of the used IT platform, and of development costs, human resources, and environment impact. GPIs relate to service development, deployment, and maintenance. An approach is proposed based on monitoring the GPIs so as to enable the analysis of services from their energy consumption viewpoint. Our approach allows estimating energy efficiency of services through a comparison of behaviorally similar services (e.g., an on-line purchasing service) through the analysis of their GPIs. By collecting details from GPIs, we propose a model for an energy certificate, called Green Certificate, aimed at classifying services at given energy efficiency levels according to the energy they consume during their lifecycle.