Artificial Intelligence (AI) is used to create more sustainable production methods and model climate change, making it a valuable tool in the fight against environmental degradation. This paper describes the paradox of an energy-consuming technology serving the ecological challenges of tomorrow. The study provides an overview of the sectors that use AI-based solutions for environmental protection. It draws on numerous examples from AI for Green players to present use cases and concrete examples. In the second part of the study, the negative impacts of AI on the environment and the emerging technological solutions to support Green AI are examined. It is also shown that the research on less energy-consuming AI is motivated more by cost and energy autonomy constraints than by environmental considerations. This leads to a rebound effect that favors an increase in the complexity of models. Finally, the need to integrate environmental indicators into algorithms is discussed. The environmental dimension is part of the broader ethical problem of AI, and addressing it is crucial for ensuring the sustainability of AI in the long term.

The optimal layout of a complex system such as aerospace vehicles consists in placing a given number of components in a container in order to minimize one or several objectives under some geometrical or functional constraints. This paper presents an extended formulation of this problem as a variable-size design space (VSDS) problem to take into account a large number of architectural choices and components allocation during the design process. As a representative example of such systems, considering the layout of a satellite module, the VSDS aspect translates the fact that the optimizer has to choose between several subdivisions of the components. For instance, one large tank of fuel might be placed as well as two smaller tanks or three even smaller tanks for the same amount of fuel. In order to tackle this NP-hard problem, a genetic algorithm enhanced by an adapted hidden-variables mechanism is proposed. This latter is illustrated on a toy case and an aerospace application case representative to real world complexity to illustrate the performance of the proposed algorithms. The results obtained using the proposed mechanism are reported and analyzed.