The UK Large-Scale Complex IT Systems (LSCITS) Initiative is a research and graduate education programme focusing on the problems of developing large-scale, complex IT systems (also referred to as

Ultra-large-scale systems Ultra-large-scale system (ULSS) is a term used in fields including Computer Science, Software Engineering and Systems Engineering to refer to software intensive systems with unprecedented amounts of hardware, lines of source code, numbers of use ...

or ULSS). The initiative is funded by the

EPSRC The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is a British Research Council that provides government funding for grants to undertake research and postgraduate degrees in engineering and the physical sciences, mainly to univers ...

, with more than ten million pounds of funding awarded between 2006 and 2013.

Background

The initial motivation for the establishment of a research programme in large-scale complex IT systems was the publication of a 2004 report by the

Royal Academy of Engineering The Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) is the United Kingdom's national academy of engineering. The Academy was founded in June 1976 as the Fellowship of Engineering with support from Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who became the first senio ...

and the

British Computer Society image:Maurice Vincent Wilkes 1980 (3).jpg, Sir Maurice Wilkes served as the first President of BCS in 1957. The British Computer Society (BCS), branded BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, since 2009, is a professional body and a learned ...

. This report examined the causes of failure of a number of large software projects and made several recommendations for research to address some of these problems. A second report, authored by Seth Bullock & Dave Cliff and also published in 2004, was commissioned by the UK Government's Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) Office of Science and Technology and carried the title ''Complexity and Emergent Behaviour in ICT Systems'' The main conclusions of this report were that the primary challenges needing to be addressed in the UK are institutional and cultural obstacles to appropriate interdisciplinary research and that there was an urgent need to address omissions in UK undergraduate computer science education. In October 2005, Dave Cliff was appointed director of the LSCITS initiative by the EPSRC and was asked to consult extensively with industry on their problems in this area and, on the basis of this consultation, to form a consortium to tackle these problems. The results of the consultation were that the key concerns of industry were socio-technical issues arising from the interactions between organisations, people and systems and in high-integrity systems engineering. On the basis of this, a consortium was formed with two partners (York, Oxford) focusing on formal methods and high-integrity systems and two partners (Leeds, St Andrews) focusing on socio-technical systems. Subsequently, a further project focusing on cloud computing was approved with Bristol, St Andrews and Aston Universities as partners. The five-year research project started in October 2007 with the associated EngD program starting in October 2009.

Partners

University of Bristol The University of Bristol is a public university, public research university in Bristol, England. It received its royal charter in 1909, although it can trace its roots to a Merchant Venturers' school founded in 1595 and University College, Br ...

. Department of Computer Science (Prof Dave Cliff) *

University of Leeds The University of Leeds is a public research university in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England. It was established in 1874 as the Yorkshire College of Science. In 1884, it merged with the Leeds School of Medicine (established 1831) and was renamed Y ...

. Institute of Health Sciences (Prof Justin Keen). Dr Andreas Hild and Mr Kanwar Adeel Waheed Khan also worked on the LSCITS team along from 2008 to 2011, examining complexity in organisations aspects. *

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...

. Department of Computer Science (Prof

Marta Kwiatkowska Marta Zofia Kwiatkowska (born 1957) is a Polish theoretical computer scientist based in the United Kingdom. Kwiatkowska is Professor of Computing Systems in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, England, and a Fell ...

) *

University of St Andrews The University of St Andrews (, ; abbreviated as St And in post-nominals) is a public university in St Andrews, Scotland. It is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, oldest of the four ancient universities of Scotland and, f ...

. School of Computer Science (Prof Ian Sommerville) *

University of York The University of York (abbreviated as or ''York'' for Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a public Collegiate university, collegiate research university in York, England. Established in 1963, the university has expanded to more than thir ...

. Department of Computer Science (Prof John McDermid, Prof Tim Kelly, Prof Richard Paige, Dr Radu Calinescu)

Research

The aim of the LSCITS research project is: :"to improve existing technical approaches to complex systems engineering and to develop new socio-technical approaches that help us understand the complex interactions between organisations, processes and systems". The LSCITS stack (Figure 1) shows the research areas that are particularly relevant to LSCITS. The focus of the work of the project was initially in the following areas: * Complexity in organisations (led by

) * Socio-technical systems engineering (led by

). * Predictable software systems(led by

) * High-integrity systems (led by

) Work on mathematical foundations was not included as these were funded in a separate research programme by the

with complexity science research centres at the

and the

University of Warwick The University of Warwick ( ; abbreviated as ''Warw.'' in post-nominal letters) is a public research university on the outskirts of Coventry between the West Midlands and Warwickshire, England. The university was founded in 1965 as part of ...

. A further centre on complex systems simulation was funded later at the

University of Southampton The University of Southampton (abbreviated as ''Soton'' in post-nominal letters) is a public university, public research university in Southampton, England. Southampton is a founding member of the Russell Group of research-intensive universit ...

. The work on novel computational approaches was superseded by work on

cloud computing Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

as the significance of this area emerged during the project. The Key Publications below describe the work of the project in more detail.

The LSCITS EngD programme

The LSCITS EngD programme is an

Engineering Doctorate Engineering is the practice of using natural science, mathematics, and the engineering design process to solve problems within technology, increase efficiency and productivity, and improve systems. Modern engineering comprises many subfiel ...

scheme, coordinated by the

that focuses on training and research in complex IT systems. Students on the programme take a range of core and optional taught modules and carry out research in conjunction with an industrial sponsor. The key difference between this programme and a conventional PhD is that students spend the majority of their time working with the industrial sponsor and may submit a portfolio thesis, describing several related research projects on a common theme, rather than a single topic. Core modules on the scheme include * Empirical Methods for LSCITS * High-Integrity Systems Engineering * Predictable Software Systems * Socio-Technical Systems * Systems Engineering for LSCITS * Technology Innovation Students take a number of optional modules in addition to these core topics from computer science, mathematics and management. Overall, the core and optional modules are intended to provide EngD students with breadth as well as depth in LSCITS topics. In parallel with the taught part of the programme, students carry out research; research projects span LSCITS topics, including socio-technical systems, high-performance computing, cloud computing, systems and software engineering, safety critical systems, interactive and accessible systems, and advanced decision making. EngD industrial sponsors include leading multi-national corporations, through to small-to-medium-sized enterprises who wish to build research capability and capacity.

Management and governance

Operational management of the entire LSCITS Initiative is the responsibility of the director (Dave Cliff), and the two initiative co-directors (Ian Sommerville and John McDermid). Ian Sommerville manages integration across the various LSCITS work-packages and activities. John McDermid works with Richard Paige, the LSCITS EngD Centre Director, to manage the York-based LSCITS Engineering Doctorate programme. The director reports to the chair of the LSCITS International Scientific Advisory Board, and to the chair of the LSCITS National Stakeholder Board. These two boards provide their guidance and advice on the LSCITS research and training programmes.

Key publications

The papers below, organised according to the LSCITS stack shown in Figure 1, describe the work of the project. A full list of publications is available on the LSCITS web site.

LSCITS in general

* R. Calinescu & M. Kwiatkowska (2010). Software Engineering Techniques for the Development of Systems of Systems. In C. Choppy & O. Sokolski (editors), Foundations of Computer Software. Future Trends and Techniques for Development, vol. 6026 of LNCS, pp. 59–82, Springer. Preprint available online. * D. Cliff & L. Northrop (2011)
The Global Financial Markets: An Ultra-Large Scale Systems Perspective.
Briefing paper for UK Government Office for Science Foresight project on The Future of Computer Trading in the Financial Markets. September 2011. *I. Sommerville, D. Cliff, R. Calinescu, J. Keen, T. Kelly, M. Kwiatkowska, J. McDermid, and R. Paige. (2011
Large Scale Complex IT Systems.

Complexity in organisations

*J. Rooksby and I. Sommerville. (2012
The Management and Use of Social Network Sites in a Government Department.
Computer-supported Cooperative Work – The Journal of Collaborative Computing. *J. Keen. (2011

Paper prepared for IRSPM XV, Dublin, 11–13 April 2011. *J. Keen. (2009) Integration at Any Price: The Case of the NHS National Programme for IT. In: H Margetts, C Hood and 6 P (eds) Paradoxes of Modernization. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Socio-technical systems engineering

* *I. Sommerville (editor)
The Socio-technical Systems Engineering Handbook.
(2011). University of St Andrews.

High-integrity systems

*X. Ge, R.F. Paige, J. McDermid
Probabilistic Failure Propagation and Transformation Analysis.
SAFECOMP 2009: 215–228. * *

Predictable software systems

*R. Calinescu, L. Grunske, M. Kwiatkowska, R. Mirandola, G. Tamburrelli (2011)
Dynamic QoS Management and Optimisation in Service-Based Systems.
In: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. *L. Feng, M. Kwiatkowska and D. Parker. (2011
Automated Learning of Probabilistic Assumptions for Compositional Reasoning.
Proc. 14th International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering (FASE'11), volume 6603 of LNCS, pages 2–17, Springer. *M. Kwiatkowska. (2007
Quantitative Verification: Models, Techniques and Tools.
Proc. 6th joint meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE), pages 449–458, ACM Press. *M. Kwiatkowska, G. Norman and D. Parker. (2009
PRISM: Probabilistic Model Checking for Performance and Reliability Analysis.
ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review, 36(4), pages 40–45, ACM.

Cloud computing

*John Cartlidge and Ilango Sriram (2011)
Modelling resilience in cloud-scale data centres.
Proceedings of 23rd European Modeling and Simulation Symposium, Rome. September 2011 *A. Khajeh-Hosseini, D. Greenwood, J. W. Smith & I. Sommerville (2011)
The Cloud Adoption Toolkit: Supporting Cloud Adoption Decisions in the Enterprise.
Software: Practice and Experience – Special Issue on Software Architectures and Application Development Environments for Cloud Computing.

Publications by similar groups

Ultra-large scale systems: Overview. Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University.
* * H. Sillitto, (2010
"Design Principles for Ultra-Large-Scale Systems".
Proc. 20th Annual International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) International Symposium, July, 2010, Chicago, IL, USA. * Northrop, L. et al. (2006)
Ultra-Large-Scale Systems: The Software Challenge of the Future.
Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. (6.5MB download)

References

{{reflist College and university associations and consortia in the United Kingdom Computer science education in the United Kingdom Computer science organizations Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council