ECDS 2012 - 6th International Workshop on Engineering Complex Distributed Systems (ECDS-2012)

Scope

The design of modern software application systems, especially that of distributed systems is a rather complex and difficult task. With the increasing complexity of software applications the need for infrastructures providing generic middleware and service functionality becomes more eminent. Distributed object standards such as Web Services, CORBA, J2EE, and .NET are currently adopted by various enterprises as fundamental technologies. Consequently, these architectures continue to advance and new functionality and services are introduced. The advances in wireless communication, ubiquitous computing and the continued applicability of Moore's law make new advanced applications - in principle - possible, and such applications can often also be demonstrated in an ad-hoc fashion. However, to offer such applications on a larger scale and to merge them with existing applications and infrastructures is very difficult. 'Smart' and 'context-aware' systems are great for end-users, if they are non-intrusive and have user-friendly interfaces, but they are hard to design, maintain and integrate, especially, if they also have to handle the Internet of Things. Design support and system support are necessary to shift/shield application complexity and to ease designers and end-users.

Furthermore, the complexity of today's applications requires additional approaches to be able to realize an enterprise application time- and cost-saving. This includes the ability to model business processes, business policies, and event-oriented aspects of large systems and express these models through design solutions to address the complexity of enterprise applications and ease software design efforts. In addition, the engineering of complex distributed systems also requires a good understanding of the problem areas of concern for information systems and business administration, such as process management, supply chain management, security issues, electronic business, etc. These topics need to be addressed in order to deal with the complexity of today's increasingly dynamic, mobile, cross-organizational, and cross-jurisdictional systems.

In this workshop various aspects of the design and implementation of distributed systems will be discussed. The scope of the presented papers ranges from process improvements, engineering approaches and techniques to applications.

Topics

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

Software engineering approaches such as process improvements, patterns, methodologies (e.g., MDA), and best practices

Modelling and meta modelling in the development of distributed systems

Platforms and infrastructures on top of which complex distributed systems can be deployed, and which take care of lower level or general-purpose functions

Complexity controlling methods which help to master complexity when designing complex distributed systems

Integration of Internet of Things and enterprise applications

Software architectures for distributed systems

Software configuration and deployment of complex distributed systems

Event-based, publish/subscribe and asynchronous platforms for distributed systems

Distributed and mobile agents

Ubiquitous computing and context-aware systems

Dynamic composition and reconfiguration of distributed systems

Process-knowledge and semantic services support

Patterns and frameworks

Lifecycle management of services and smart things

Tools and environments

Application of and Experiences with Semantic Technologies

Industrial experience reports and case studies
Papers must describe original work, and must not have been accepted or submitted for publication elsewhere. Accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings, which will be published by IEEE Computer Society.