Scope

The engineering of green software-intensive systems is critical in our drive towards a sustainable, smarter planet. The goal of green software engineering is to apply green principles to the design and operation of software-intensive systems. Green and self-greening software systems have tremendous potential to decrease energy consumption. Moreover, software can and should be re-thought to address sustainability issues using innovative business models, processes, and incentives. Monitoring and measuring the greenness of software is critical towards the notion of sustainable and green software. Demonstrating improvement is paramount for users to achieve and effect change. Analysis of the sustainability of a specific software system requires software that aids developers in weighing the four dimensions of sustainability---economic, social, environmental, and technical---with their attendant trade-offs. The software engineering community must assume leadership in this important challenge. In this workshop, we will explore the theme of “green software engineering for software sustainability” with a goal towards creating actionable outcomes that will affect how software engineering is practiced and taught in the future, in order to help organizations prioritize their sustainability objectives.

Topics

GREENS 2026 seeks contributions addressing, but not limited to, the following topics related to sustainable software systems and green software engineering:

  • Energy-efficient choices for architecture and design patterns, algorithms, data structures, programming languages, language runtime and infrastructure.
  • Architectural implications (architectural tactics, architectural styles, design patterns and anti-patterns) for green and sustainable software
  • Practices for sustainability-aware software engineering
  • Metrics and measures for sustainability-aware software engineering
  • Sustainability-aware architectures in context (e.g., cloud-edge continuum)
  • Teaching and training of skills and competencies in sustainability-aware software engineering
  • Sustainable computing from a software engineering and software-intensive system perspective
  • Applied, or experimented with, software engineering methodologies at all levels (from requirements elicitation to architecture design, coding, testing, and maintenance)
  • Meta-analyses, and syntheses of studies to build theories on green and sustainable software; conceptual reflections related to software sustainability
  • Progress on the various dimensions of software sustainability and their interplay
  • Software adaptation for sustainability
  • Tools to support sustainability-aware decision-making
  • Sustainability of emerging computing technologies (AI systems, edge devices, generative AI-enabled applications)
  • Green AI, lighter, less data-intensive, and less energy-consuming AI models and architectures
  • Sustainable Large Language Models (LLMs) for software code
  • Green Agentic AI
  • Reduction of software organizations’ compute-heavy workloads
  • Cloud and energy efficiency
  • Standards on the environmental sustainability of software and AI software

Important Dates

  • Paper Submission: 20 Oct 2025
  • Notification: 24 Nov 2025
  • Camera-Ready: 26 Jan 2026
  • Workshop Date: April 2026

Submission Guidelines

Participants are invited to submit three types of contributions:

  • Emerging research papers (up to 8 pages): These describe contributions offering novel research results, addressing challenging real-world problems with innovative ideas. Submissions should clearly describe the challenges and problems tackled, the relevant state of the art, the solution being offered, and the potential benefits of the contribution, from an academic or industrial perspective.
  • Position papers (up to 5 pages): Contributions outlining forward-looking ideas or thought-provoking reflections that call for further discussion and research in the community. These describe a specific position or opinion of the authors or provide a well-reasoned and motivated vision.
  • Extended abstracts (up to 2 pages): These abstracts propose novel research topics for discussion in the community, addressing challenging problems from an academic or industrial perspective. The motivation for the topic is grounded in the literature or practical experience. These are free of article processing charge (APC).

All papers must be submitted electronically via the HotCRP submission system by the submission deadline and must not have been published before or be submitted for review elsewhere while under consideration at GREENS. All submissions must be in PDF format and conform, at time of submission, to the official “ACM Primary Article Template”, which can be obtained from the ACM Proceedings Template page. LaTeX users should use the sigconf option, as well as the review (to produce line numbers for easy reference by the reviewers) and anonymous (omitting author names) options. To that end, the following LaTeX code can be placed at the start of the LaTeX document: \documentclass[sigconf,review,anonymous]{acmart}. Submissions must strictly conform to the ACM conference proceedings formatting instructions specified above. Alterations of spacing, font size, and other changes that deviate from the instructions may result in desk rejection without further review. All papers will go through a single blind submission process and will be reviewed on the basis of technical quality, relevance, significance, and clarity by the program committee members. The workshop proceedings will be published in ICSE 2026 Companion proceedings.

Organization Committee

Steering Committee:

Workshop Chairs:

Web and Proceedings Chair:

Program Committee (TBD)