Objective
To attain its goals, the group will perform the following activities:
- Foundational work. Various languages and models for co-ordination are being developed in the group.
These individual efforts will be enhanced by a broad collaboration within the group, through the means of electronic communication (continuously), short visits among partners (one per partner per year, on average) and internal workshops gathering all partners (one per year).
- Case studies. The assessment of the practical applicability of said languages and models is quite important, so we will set up case studies provided by the industrial partners, based on real large-scale applications and covering a wide spectrum of practical issues. All partners will work on some of these, trying to provide software solutions that will inevitably uncover merits and deficiencies of the various technical approaches.
- Dissemination of results. For increasing the downstream effects of our research we plan two major dissemination activities: sponsoring a regular international conference on co-ordination, and publishing on the World Wide Web an up-to-date survey of the field that will highlight and put in context our results.
Exploitation and impact
We foresee a medium-term impact of co-ordination technology on the software development process for large-scale concurrent and distributed systems, such as those for traffic management (air, railway or motorway), on-board control (in aircrafts, trains, or automobiles), process control (e.g. in chemical industries), command-and control, water level management, or energy production and distribution.
For this to happen we must reach a stage of sufficient maturity and awareness of co-ordination technology, that will trigger projects in concrete application areas for its deployment.
Our strategy is therefore based on combining still needed research developments, steered by the applicability test of our case studies, with the dissemination of results through a specialised conference and a field survey on the World Wide Web.
Software systems tend to grow in size and complexity; they are often developed through a long period of time and become extremely difficult to understand and to maintain. The cost incurred by this complexity is becoming a serious concern, and a major challenge today is to find software solutions for making large applications manageable, favouring the reuse of components. Several languages or systems have been proposed to tackle this problem: they are called software architecture languages, configuration languages or co-ordination languages. Despite some differences of emphasis, they share a common point of view: the definition of a software application should make a clear distinction between individual components and their co-ordinated interaction in the overall software organisation.
The current understanding of co-ordination issues is still fragmentary, however, and its betterment is the main goal of this working group. We aim at establishing an European leadership in such a critical field, by joining theoreticians and practitioners in a collaborative assessment of diverse problems and approaches, with a view towards consolidating the foundational work and identifying promising technological avenues worth exploring in more focused Esprit projects.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftwaresoftware applicationssystem software
- engineering and technologymechanical engineeringvehicle engineeringaerospace engineeringaircraft
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftwaresoftware development
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesinternetworld wide web
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Topic(s)
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
ACM - Preparatory, accompanying and support measuresCoordinator
Lisbon
Portugal