ICT-2007.1.2: Service and Software Architectures, Infrastructures and Engineering

Target outcome

1. Service architectures, platforms, technologies, methods and tools that enable contextawareness and discovery, advertising, personalisation and dynamic composition of services. They should support flexible business models, provide for service management, and guarantee end-to-end quality of service. They will cater for multiple component technologies and support vendor independence. Opportunities for standardisation should be exploited.ing:
   
   
2. Service/software engineering approaches development processes, product lifecycle and tools for dynamically composed systems with dependable quality of service and reliability properties and promoting new open development paradigms with a higher degree of involvement of joint user and development communities.
   
   
3. Strategies and technologies enabling mastery of complexity, dependability, and behavioural stability in complex systems and in systems evolving over time without central design. Appropriate mechanisms should guarantee end-to-end quality of service.
   
   
4. Virtualisation tools, system software, middleware and network-centric operating systems, including Grid-based systems, that orchestrate unlimited, heterogeneous and dynamic resources distributed across multiple platforms as a single entity, and provide platform-independent access and sharing of knowledge, processing, communication, storage and content. They also enable the definition and execution of tasks and workflows for collaboration and operation across multiple domains and optimise usage of distributed resources.
   
   
5. Coordination and support actions for:
   1. roadmapping, strategy and policy formulation, clustering of activities, support for standardisation and conference support;
   2. coordination with national or regional programmes or initiatives.
      

Expected impact

Improving the competitiveness of enterprises and the efficiency of organisations in Europe by:

• Allowing the creation of dynamic services with guaranteed properties and new networked applications capable of interoperation across a wide variety of business domains and organisations of all sizes. Supporting all organisations developing or using software and services, particularly SMEs, to improve their competitiveness and adjust to the emerging global service economy.
• Increased efficiency and productivity in software development and higher level of software reliability through novel service and software engineering tools and improved mastering of complex systems.
• New opportunities, notably for SMEs, through open and standard platforms and interfaces for: software and service development; middleware for resource sharing; and next generation operating systems.

Funding schemes: CP, NoE, CSA

Indicative budget distribution: 102 M€:

• CP 91 M€ of which a minimum of 38 M€ to IP and a minimum of 30 M€ to STREP;
• NoE 9 M€;
• CSA 2 M€