A Petri net simulation of software development lifecycle towards green IT

In this work, we present a novel simulation approach using Petri nets to study optimal policies for software development while reducing carbon footprint. We use CPN Tools as our Petri net framework to develop the simulation model of a software development lifecycle. The motivation behind the work is to apply simulation techniques to obtain the optimal resource configuration for a software development project and reduce its carbon footprint. We show a subset of our experiments conducted using the Petri net simulation to illustrate its capabilities. We model the different resources using colored tokens in a timed hierarchical Petri net and monitor the carbon footprint of the software as it goes through its lifecycle. Our simulation experiments show that allocating developers with medium skills is the preferred suboptimal policy, as it has both relatively low carbon footprint and lower cost of software development compared to allocating the extremely skilled developers.