All hail the immortal app?
A Raytheon BBN Technologies-led team has been awarded a contract sponsored by the US Air Force (USAF) to develop methods to make mobile applications viable for up to 100 years, irrespective of operating system upgrades or changes in hardware and supporting services. The four-year $7.8 million contract was announced on 2 May.
The contract comes under the DARPA's Building Resource Adaptive Software Systems programme, with the industry team including Syracuse University, Vanderbilt University, Oregon State University and Securboration.
Under the contract, the team plans to develop a set of static and dynamic discovery techniques to identify the impact of app ecosystem changes on software functionality; develop a set of transformation technologies to modify software to adapt to these changes; and create a software framework for demonstrating and evaluating software evolution in response to ecosystem changes.
By doing so, the team hopes to support the development of long-lived software systems that satisfy critical customer needs over generations of devices and emerging missions.
Partha Pal, principal scientist, Raytheon BBN, said: ‘Mobile apps are pervasive in the military, but frequent operating system upgrades, new devices and changing missions and environments require manual software engineering that is expensive and causes unacceptable delays.
‘We are developing techniques to eliminate these interruptions by identifying the way these changes affect application functionality and modifying the software.’
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