[ecoop-info] CFP: JSS Special Issue on “Architecting for a Sustainable Digital Society”

[ELENA MARÍA NAVARRO MARTÍNEZ]

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                        Call for Papers to a JSS Special Issue on
              “Architecting for a Sustainable Digital Society”
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Guest editors
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Stefan Biffl, Technical University of Vienna, Austria (Stefan.Biffl at tuwien.ac.at<mailto:Stefan.Biffl at tuwien.ac.at>)
Elena Navarro, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain (Elena.Navarro at uclm.es<mailto:Elena.Navarro at uclm.es>)
Raffaela Mirandola, Politecnico di Milano, Italy (raffaela.mirandola at polimi.it<mailto:raffaela.mirandola at polimi.it>)
Danny Weyns, KU Leuven, Belgium and Linnaeus University Sweden (danny.weyns at kuleuven.be<mailto:danny.weyns at kuleuven.be>)

Theme
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Recent events, in particular the COVID-19 pandemic, have demonstrated the need for digital tools allowing people to meet, interact, and collaborate. Software-enabled systems must facilitate not only collaborative work, but also humanitarian needs like healthcare, online learning from kindergarten to postgraduate levels, and social networking. Such systems must be developed considering personal needs, the diversity of the population, their privacy needs, and physical safety. Moreover, this new generation of software-enabled systems must provide us a more sustainable world, from smart homes to industries and cities. All these challenges highlight critical considerations on what software-enabled systems to develop in the coming years, and especially on how to design these systems to offer a more Sustainable Digital Society.
The software engineering community is facing these challenges when developing solutions, in contemporary areas such as Cyber Physical Systems, IoT, and Cloud/Edge-computing. Evidence shows that one of the most critical success factors for the design and development of these systems has been raising the level of abstraction by focusing on their software architecture. The architecture of a software system describes its static and dynamic structures in terms of its software components, their inter-connection and properties as well as the rationale explaining its design and evolution.  A prescriptive architecture can be an artifact devised by an architect to make a decision about what design to choose among alternatives, as well as an artifact dynamically composed by a running system that uses it to make decisions about selecting alternative configurations to deal with runtime change.
This special issue aims at establishing a step forward to architecting the software systems demanded by a Sustainable Digital Society. Among others, this special issue aims at contributing with theories, methods, techniques, and tools that software architects and engineers need in order to ensure that the architectures of these software-enabled systems demanded by our digital society will be understandable, verifiable, adaptable, and evolvable to meet their even changing functional and quality requirements. Contributions are expected to be presented with evidence highlighting how they pursue and contribute to a Sustainable Digital Society. Moreover, case studies compiling both success and failure experiences can contribute to this Special Issue for exploitation in future research.

Topics of interest related to such the next generation of software intensive systems include, but are not limited to:
- Foundational principles of software architecture for a sustainable digital society
- Linking requirements engineering and architectural design and development
- Quality attributes and software architectures
- Architectural design, analysis, conformance checking and evaluation
- Architecture description languages and meta-models
- Architecture verification and validation while developing software
- Architectural concerns of self-adaptive and autonomic systems for a digital society
- Architectures for reconfigurable and self-adaptive systems for a sustainable digital society
- Runtime decision-making of self-adaptive systems
- Uncertainty management in architecture-based adaptation
- Risk mitigation of self-adaptive systems
- Management of architectural knowledge, decisions, and rationale
- Cross-disciplinary efforts and software architecture
- Architectural patterns, styles and tactics, reference architectures, viewpoints and views while developing software for a digital society
- Software architecture and virtualization for a sustainable digital society
- Architecture-centric process models and frameworks
- Component-based models and deployment, middleware
- Software architecture and agility, continuous integration, continuous development and DevOps tools
- Software architecture and system architecture, including software-defined networking, for a digital society
- Software tools and environments for architecture-centric software engineering
- Cultural, economic, business, social and managerial aspects of software architecture for a sustainable digital society
- Software architecture in different areas such as the cloud/edge-cloud, big data, blockchain, digital twins, cyber-physical systems, IoT, autonomous systems, systems of systems, energy-aware software
- Architecture and technical debt

Important dates
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They are all hard deadlines AoE:

Submission: 15 March 2022
Notification to authors (first round): 16 May 2022
Submission of revised papers (second round): 15 July 2022
Notification to authors (second round): 12 September 2022
Submission after second review: 14 November 2022
Final acceptance: 12 December 2022
Proposed date of publication: 19 December 2022

Submission Guidelines
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The call for this special issue is open. We accept original and previously unpublished research results, yet, we encourage the submission of revised and extended papers from the 15th European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA 2021).
We seek high-quality contributions on architecting software-enabled systems for a sustainable digital society, both fundamental and applied research, including foundations, methods, and processes, as well as novel applications. All submissions shall be supported by appropriate arguments and validation through case studies, experiments, or systematic comparisons with other approaches or benchmarks. If a previous version of the article has been published at ECSA 2021, then authors should explain properly the novelty of this new submission and must provide at least 30% new material.
Manuscripts and supplementary material needs to be submitted at the Elsevier Editorial System at http://ees.elsevier.com/jss. Please, select “VSI:ECSA2021” from the “Choose Article Type” pull-down menu during submission. All submitted papers should adhere to the general principles of the Journal of Systems and Software articles. Submissions have to be prepared according to the Guide for Authors, available on the journal website. The submitted paper must follow the format specified in the JSS Guide for Authors: www.elsevier.com/journals/journal-of-systems-and-software/0164-1212/guide-for-authors<http://www.elsevier.com/journals/journal-of-systems-and-software/0164-1212/guide-for-authors>.