Edge hardware

The objects in this sub-bucket describe decentralized hardware fleets — IoT sensors, industrial controllers, smartphones, any deployed unit whose impact scales with how many are in the field rather than with centralized demand.

The fleet is described in two passes.

A single deployed unit is an EdgeDevice: a chassis with embodied carbon, plus a list of EdgeComponents that carry their own fabrication and operational impact. The available component types are EdgeRAMComponent, EdgeCPUComponent, EdgeStorage, and EdgeWorkloadComponent, the last being a linear whole-device utilisation curve used when the internal hardware is not modelled in detail. For two common construction patterns, e-footprint provides convenience builders that wire the components for you: EdgeComputer (RAM + CPU + storage) and EdgeAppliance (a single linear workload curve).

How many units are deployed is set in two places that multiply together. EdgeDeviceGroup expresses the fleet structure: a composition node that holds multiplicities for child EdgeDevices and child EdgeDeviceGroups, with arbitrary nesting — a building contains rooms contain devices, a vehicle contains subsystems, and so on. EdgeUsagePattern then expresses the deployment schedule — when copies of that fleet come online in a given country (see usage_edge_index). The total count of any single device is the unrolled group multiplicity times the deployment count from the pattern.

The fabrication and operational footprint of the fleet — typically the dominant output of an edge model — comes out of this combination.

New to this paradigm? Start with web_vs_edge for the mental model that ties these objects to the rest of e-footprint.