Smart living environments require appropriate software infrastructures able to integrate independent subsystems and support their seamless cooperation. Each subsystem must both exist as an independent entity and become part of wider systems when needed. This vision radically changes the notion of “integrated” system:
- Subsystems offer limited interaction capabilities and little possibility to be controlled
- Although the number of subsystems available at runtime might be huge, their cooperation can be ad-hoc and only needed in specific cases or conditions
- Often there is no prior, complete, knowledge of the subsystems, thus their presence and capabilities must be inferred dynamically when the need for cooperation arises.
The GAUSS project will deliver the methodological enablers required to identify, integrate, and manage “emergent” Systems of Systems (eSoS). These require dynamic and opportunistic engineering due to their intrinsically variable nature tied to their scale and heterogeneity. GAUSS will release a set of integrated technologies to address these engineering problems of eSoS at runtime, when specific execution contexts may invalidate design-time solutions. GAUSS will govern eSoS by enriching initial lightweight designs with concrete and contextualised aspects obtained from the runtime context.