Five UK universities are joining forces with companies including BAE Systems, BT, and Rolls-Royce to tackle the science of building and running large-scale complex IT systems that underpin modern society. These systems—such as air traffic control, energy grids, and banking networks—are notoriously difficult to design and manage because they must serve many competing stakeholders, integrate with older legacy systems, and remain dependable under constant political and organisational pressure. The problem is that no single engineering approach can fully define or control them. The researchers argue that these systems should be treated not as single monolithic projects but as "systems of systems," where the focus shifts to understanding the relationships between interacting components, procurement processes, and operational environments. If successful, the initiative will create a self-sustaining national network of researchers and industry practitioners trained to handle these challenges. The £5.6 million research programme will fund coordinated work packages across academia and industry, while a separate £4 million Engineering Doctorate programme will train the next generation of specialists. The goal is to move from ad-hoc fixes to a repeatable engineering discipline for complex IT systems that quietly keep society running.
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We intend to establish a UK National strategic coordinated research and training initiative centred on issues in the science and engineering of Large-Scale Complex IT Systems (LSCITS: pronounced else-its). We propose the creation of a coordinated national network of researchers in industry and academia with the skills and knowledge appropriate to dealing with the problems of designing, managing, and main-taining current and future LSCITS across their life-cycles. Pursu-ng research that addresses these problems, and training the researchers who will undertake that research or apply its findings in practice, are two major strategic needs at the national level. The proposed Initiative's programme of work is intended to last for five years, but it is our intent that this be viewed as a period of pump-priming ramp-up , establishing at steady-state a well-coordinated community of interacting researchers, self-sustaining by generating ongoing financial support from public funds and from industrial sponsorship and collaborations. Thus we include here a discussion of our plans for continuing the Initiative beyond its fifth year. Total funds requested from EPSRC are approx 9.6m, of which 4m is dedicated to establishing and running an Engineering Doctorate (EngD) training programme, and 5.6m is dedicated to funding a coordinated set of research work-packages. Both the EngD and the research programme are intended to be conducted with close involvement from industry. The EngD proposal will be submitted separately, once the outcome of this application for 5.6m funding of the research programme is known.Our proposal marks the formation of a new partnership between leading academics from five UK universities, who each have significant histories of research and education leadership in complementary aspects of the science and engineering of LSCITS. Additionally, all five of the authors of this proposal have very strong links into relevant companies across several major sectors of UK industry. Companies who have indicated an intent to be-come involved in significant ways at this stage include Accenture, BAE Systems, BT, DSTL, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Praxis, Qinetiq, and Rolls-Royce. Our Case For Support document presents a broad picture of our proposal and sets out what we plan to achieve. It should be read in conjunction with its extensive appendices which provide inter alia a significantly more detailed discussion of the background, research work-plan, EngD, exploitation/IPR strategies, and community-building activities.Our overall approach can be characterised as follows. The complexity that is inherent in large-scale systems stems from a variety of causes. These systems are often designed to address so-called 'wicked problems' which, by their very nature cannot be completely defined: they have to meet the (rapidly changing) needs of diverse stakeholders; they must integrate with a range of other legacy systems, processes and policies; they may be critical systems that have to deliver both a high level of performance and dependability; and they are profoundly affected by political influences in the organisations developing and procuring the system, and in the broader system's environment. While it would be simplistic to suggest that we can address all of the problems, we believe that we can make significant progress by altering our perspective on the engineering of large-scale complex IT systems. Rather than considering this to be a problem of specifying, developing, deploying and operating a large-scale system, , we believe that we should look at the problem as being a system of systems problem. By examining the relationships between the different systems that make up and interact with each other, and the systems involved in procuring, deploying and operating software, we believe that we can make headway in tackling the issue of complexity.
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