| Most infrastructure systems as we know them today, such as the power network, the telephone network, the TV broadcast infrastructure and the Internet, evolved from rather primitive systems with limited scope into highly advanced global systems that in a number of aspects still carry and sometimes suffer from the choices made at the conception of the systems. Evolving these systems to cope with the ever changing market demands requires careful designs and deep understanding of the systems. System evolvability is a system's ability to withstand changes to its requirements, environment and implementation technologies. The need for greater systems evolvability is becoming recognized, especially in the engineering of computer based systems, where the development, commissioning and replacement of large systems is highly resource intensive. Despite this need, there are no formal means for evaluating the evolvability of a system and thus no means of proving that one system is more evolvable than another. This project recognizes this and aims to provide generic methods that will lead to the design of high evolvable systems. |
