MUSIC: Self-adapting applications for mobile users in ubiquitous Computing Environments

MUSIC is a focused initiative that will develop a comprehensive open-source software development framework that facilitates the development of self-adapting, reconfigurable software that seamlessly adapts to the highly dynamic user and execution context, and maintains a high level usefulness across context changes. Context-aware applications are capable of exploiting knowledge of external operating conditions, and they are self-adaptive if they adapt at runtime to varying contexts, like changing user needs and operating environments. MUSIC will provide a design methodology and distributed system architecture for the design and implementation of self-adapting applications in ubiquitous computing environments. This will be complemented with enhanced modelling languages for the specification of context dependencies and adaptation capabilities, supported by model specification, validation and simulation tools. This platform will be used to develop trial services, based on a set of challenging application scenarios with real market potential, having a central role: as sources of requirements, to assess technical adequacy of the results, and to promote the results. MUSIC thus invites the user to take for granted a high level of service usability, reliability and responsiveness. The user will be released from the complex configuration and administration that are imposed on users by many applications today. Thus, MUSIC is not only about the immediate technical objectives of self-configuration of context-aware applications, but it represents a noteworthy response to the vision of autonomic computing as articulated by major industrial players. MUSIC includes major industrial players in the mobile market, several SMEs (one IST prize winner) specialising in mobile services, organisations with expertise in the domains of the trial services, Universities, and research institutions. The duration will be 42 months, the budget 14.5MEuros, and the requested grant 8.678MEuros.