Lifecycle engineering for Future Internet Applications

The Future Internet initiative provides a unique opportunity to create a 21st century infrastructure that meets the global needs of business and society. Many social and economic challenges exist when we examine how to support the interplay between stakeholders responsible for governing content, service and network lifecycles. The lifecycles of each are changing radically and independently but still deliver economic value to each actor. One challenge is how to develop and operate systems cost-effectively where the lifecycle of components are developed and governed increasinly separately. To deliver new opportunities greater flexibility is needed in value chains and we need to move away from traditional models where all aspects are located together (for example, consider television and how the way that content is commissioned and shot is actually a result of the way people will view it on a TV set and the way it will get to them over the airwaves - the device, channel and content are all connected). This additional flexibility introduces economic complexity that requires stakeholders to assess and mitigate business risk dynamically. New operation models for system lifecycles (which will have significant human factors) will need to be developed that maintain the socio-economic balance between different players, an essential factor for the success of the Future Internet initative.

Example questions that we would like to investigate include:

How can systems that depend on such volatile component lifecycles be developed, marketed, supported and used? (e.g. transient systems exploiting long-lived content)

How can increasingly complex distributed systems and information be safely built by non-IT experts who will potentially be in such numbers that they dwarf those who are formally trained in software and systems engineering?