Enabling Informed Sustainability Decisions: Sustainability Assessment in Iterative System Modeling

When planning, creating, and evolving systems throughout their lifecycle, it is essential to assess their impact on our world. Despite this pressing need, existing structured methods for systematically assessing social, economic, and environmental impacts are not related to targets of the United Nations' sustainable development goals. Moreover, existing Architecture Description Languages (ADLs) lack concepts and tooling for sustainability assessment. Our aim is to allow modeling systems, their sustainability properties, and sustainability questions in a structured manner for a wide domain. This paper proposes the engineering and design of a domain-specific language for sustainability assessment embedded into ADLs and showcases its use for evaluating a citizen energy community system as a case study. We discuss possibilities on how to use such models in their further processing and explore challenges in technical realization. This initial step towards standardizing the sustainability assessments of modeled systems throughout the development is both comprehensive and formal so that developers can make informed, sustainable decisions based on consequence assessments upfront.