Sustainable Systems Engineering

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations (UN) member states, aims to ensure that living conditions and required resources meet current human needs without undermining the integrity and stability of the natural system in the long run (United Nations 2015). The UN defined seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These SDGs aim to end poverty, improve health and education, reduce inequality, and stimulate economic growth while addressing climate change and ensuring ecological integrity (United Nations 2015). Clearly, Business and Information Systems Engineering (BISE) plays a crucial role in realizing these goals. There seems to be a consensus that sustainability has at least three dimensions (also called pillars): (1) environmental, (2) economic, and (3) social. Although all three dimensions are important and interrelated, we would like to focus on the environmental dimension and how this relates to BISE (Fig. 1). Until now, there has been a strong correlation between human welfare and ecological footprints. In developed countries scoring high on the human development index, the ecological footprint per capita is much higher than in less developed countries. However, people realize increasingly that in the long run this will lead to global disasters ranging from global warming and rising sea levels to crop failures, undernutrition, and economic instability. Energy and food shortages due to the Ukraine war and broken supply chains due to the Covid-19 pandemic signaled the need for change. Business and Information Systems Engineering (BISE) as a community will need to play an essential role in this. Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and various forms of automation (e.g., Robotic Process Automation) will continue to transform the world. Therefore, researchers and legislators are concerned with the ethics of these technologies and trying to address problems such as the lack of explainability of black-box algorithms (Bauer et al. 2021) and infringements of citizens’ rights (e.g., privacy violations and biases). However, when it comes to climate change, we are facing even bigger challenges. Therefore, topics such as circularity deserve more attention. With this editorial, we would like to stimulate more research devoted to ‘‘BISE for sustainability’’ and the ‘‘sustainability of BISE’’. The first focuses on the development of information systems to improve the sustainability of existing products and systems. The second focuses on the direct implications of information processing on the environment, e.g., the energy use of large server farms. According to the New York Times, creating bitcoins to spend or trade consumes around 91 terawatt-hours of electricity annually, more than the whole energy usage of a country like Finland (Huang et al. 2021). The training of neural networks is also becoming an increasing factor in W. M. P. van der Aalst (&) Lehrstuhl für Informatik 9, RWTH Aachen, Ahornstr. 55, 52056 Aachen, Germany e-mail: wvdaalst@pads.rwth-aachen.de