About the Group

We have had for many years an established track record and an internationally leading reputation in service-based software architectures and dependable distributed computing. Professor Jie Xu's work on co-ordinated atomic actions, distributed exception handling, and software dependability is internationally known.

This new technology consists of:

1. Systems Architecture approaches for dependable dynamic systems integration. This work looks at improving dependability of networked systems to cope with changes during operational runtime and changes over evolutions of system development. Evaluation of architectures and styles is used to predict performance and the impact of changes. The evaluation framework is a means to understand the business value of loosely coupled systems integration throughout the lifecycle, from concept, development to in-service changes. A catalogue of architectural styles and integration patterns has been compiled to improve dependability of dynamic distributed systems. The architectural styles include Service-oriented architecture, peer-to-peer, resource-oriented, virtualisation and agent-based. Architectural patterns that provide fault-tolerant mechanisms reinforces the importance of dependability.

   The group is leading the Systems Architecture topic in NECTISE investigating architectural approaches to Systems Engineering for Network Enabled Capability as used by UK military services. Further to this, the evolving integration of dependable networks is also being applied to healthcare and e-Health systems.

2. New generic services for privacy-preserving and fault tolerance so as to facilitate the secure and dependable execution of Grid applications in a ubiquitous and potentially non-trustworthy network environment. Our technology represents the significant trend in the application space - future distributed applications will be based on compositions of secure services discovered and provided dynamically at run time. Some of this work won the BCS Brendan Murphy Prize for 2001.

We have also chaired and organised successfully a number of important IEEE conferences and workshops to shape the future research directions, and our work has been published in top US journals and conferences.