The First International Next Generation of Modularity Approaches for Multiple Dimensions of Sustainability (MDS 2015) workshop provides a forum to discuss the challenges for the next generation of approaches aiming at modelling the multiple dimensions of sustainable systems.

Over the last several decades, sustainability has becoming an urgent issue. As the Internet becomes increasingly pervasive in our daily lives, we witness the rise of global systems that handle large, complex, networked and heterogeneous systems that involve software, a wide range of hardware devices, people, and their environment. In this setting, the cyberspace and the physical world blend into a single and complex cyber-physical system.  Such software-intensive global systems are present in many relevant socio-economic domains such as smart cities (including urban planning, energy, transport, emergency systems) and Earth observations, thus strongly affecting human life on our planet. Consequently, we believe that the next generation of modelling approaches should support multiple dimensions of sustainability, ranging from long-lasting dependable and dynamically adaptive software, to green software requiring less computing and energy resources, to software that encourages sustainable human behaviour (e.g., smart plugs and appliances, and market design and regulations that transition consumers towards more energy-saving practices; the so-called “power of the negawatt”).

Approaches supporting various dimensions of sustainability are likely to have a substantial positive impact on people and the environment for the short term and the long term. This workshop intends to identify new modularisation approaches to meet the challenges posed by the sea change in the nature of sustainable, global software systems, which is considerably different from the traditional modularisation approaches’ perspective.