PhD Scholarship: Service Oriented Architectures for Complex Systems Integration

Major Defence capability systems have been growing in complexity and
scale. A Key Challenge confronting Defence today is the acquisition of
advanced technology complex military systems that require systems and
system of systems integration to enable the realisation and
sustainment of major capabilities such as Airwarfare, strike, undersea
warfare capability etc. Rates of technology change, scale and
complexities of systems meeting Defence needs however challenge the
realisation of leading edge capability.  Another challenge is managing
the risks associated with procuring the architecture and design of
electronic systems and subsystems and their subsequent integration
into an overall system with a defined purpose and performance
characteristics in an operational environment.

Service-oriented architectures are finding more and more widespread
use in the civilian sectors, promising new solutions from a new
architecture for middleware functionality to providing
interoperability, automated establishment of service connections, and
the monitoring and (if necessary) autonomic repair of service
functionality. A key concern in the SOA deployment is to determine
the expected benefits in large scale complex systems integration and
interoperability driven environments that are typical of the modern
Defense sector.  This encompasses two different levels: technological
and organisational.  While many SOA concepts are derived from
classical business process management/workflow technology, the
technical advances lead to many lessons being forgotten or wheels
reinvented.  The core aspects of this thesis will examine the methods
existing for defining SOA architectures and their applications to
complex military systems integration, and study how such
specifications could be used to improve the handling, documentation,
and execution of organisational processes with an underlying SOA
infrastructure.  Possible description methods for SOA systems will be
studied and the question studied as to how (and under which
conditions) these approaches can fulfil the expectations placed in t
he deployment of SOA.

The PhD candidate will be working within a research group currently
funded by multiple ARC Discovery projects and multiple CRC
projects.

Applicants must be Australian or New Zealand citizens or Australian
Permanent Residents to apply. They must demonstrate equivalent research
qualifications or experience to an Australian Honours (at least Class 2)
degree in Computer Science or Software or Systems Engineering as well as
evidence of their strong programming skills.

For further information regarding the project, please contact
Prof.Markus Stumptner, Advanced Computing Research Centre, University
of South Australia. Email: mst@cs.unisa.edu.au, telephone: 08 8302 3965.