Change Alone is Unchanging - Continuous Context-aware Adaptation of Service-based Systems for Smart Cities and Communities.

Service-based systems have to deal with highly dynamic environments in which they must often operate. Consider for instance the case of smart cities and communities, i.e., communities of people who actively participate to the creation and use of ICT-based solutions to improve their quality of life within their own city or region. Within a smart city and community, the context in which applications must operate continuously changes, as well as the situation, the accessibility to (ICT-based) services, the people, their interactions, requirements, and preferences. Moreover, most often, the only way applications can react to such changing environment is at run-time, since we cannot predict a priori different situations, requirements, interactions, and availability of (ICT) services. Continuous context-aware and incremental adaptation becomes therefore the key enabling property for the delivery of ICT based value added services to cope with the dynamics of the continuously changing environment. In my talk, I will present some of the compelling needs for context aware incremental adaptation in the case of service-based applications for smart cities and communities. I will discuss some alternative approaches, some lessons learned from applications we have been working with in this field, and the still many related open research challenges.