Section: Overall Objectives

Scientific Foundations

Distributed software services and systems are central to many human activities, such as communication, commerce, education, defense, etc. Distributed software services consist of an ever growing number of devices, often highly heterogeneous, from cloud platforms, sensor networks, to application servers, desktop machines, and mobile devices, such as smartphones. The future of this huge number of interconnected software services has been called the Internet of Services, a vision "where everything that is needed to use software applications is available as a service on the Internet, such as the software itself, the tools to develop the software, the platform servers, storage and communication to run the software."  (http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/ssai ) This pervasiveness continuously leads to new usages that in turn foster the emergence of novel requirements and concepts for new software services. Hence, it is necessary to establish new paradigms to design and execute software programs in these highly interconnected and heterogeneous environments, and it is necessary to ensure not only that these software systems can be adapted to new usages, new infrastructures, and new execution environments in the long term, but also that after the adaptation process the services still perform as expected.

This research project focuses on defining self-adaptive software services and middleware. From the perspective of the Internet of Services, this project fits in the vision sketched by e.g., the FP8 Expert Group Services in the Future Internet  [85] , the NESSI Research Priorities for the next Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development FP8  [89] , the Roadmap for Advanced Cloud Technologies under H2020  [86] , and research roadmaps, such as  [95] , [84] , [72] .