Scheduling is adopted in various domains to assign jobs to resources, such that an objective is optimized. While schedules enable the analysis of the underlying system, publishing them also incurs a privacy risk. Recently, privacy attacks on schedules have been proposed, which may reveal sensitive information on the jobs by solving an inverse scheduling problem. In this work, we study the protection against such attacks. We formulate the problem of privacy-and-utility preservation of schedules, which bounds both, the privacy leakage and the loss in the utility of the schedule due to obfuscation. We address the problem based on a set of perturbation functions for schedules, study their instantiations for standard scheduling problems, and implement privacy-and-utility-aware publishing of a schedule using constraint programming. Experiments with synthetic and real-world schedules demonstrate the feasibility, robustness, and effectiveness of our mechanism.

As sustainability increasingly gains attention, it has also found its way into the area of software engineering, with a specific emphasis on requirements engineering. The Sustainability Awareness Framework (SusAF) proposed by Duboc et al. supports stakeholders in taking the long view at their software systems in terms of sustainability. In this paper, we propose SusApp, a web-based tool to simplify the application of the SusAF. In particular, it facilitates the documentation and visualization of effects on sustainability. To learn about the users’ perception of SusApp, we conducted two small-scale user studies that investigated the tool’s usability and usefulness. Overall, the studies showed that the tool was generally perceived positively by the participants. However, shortcomings in the usability became apparent, which have also impacted the perceived usefulness.