Impacts and Opportunities for Engineering in the Era of Cloud Computing Systems.

摘要

This report discusses the impact of cloud computing and the broader revolution in computing on systems, on the disciplines of systems engineering that have evolved over the last half century, and on new opportunities for these disciplines. This report sees the need for a new synthesis of traditional and computer-science-based variants of systems engineering. It recommends that the Department of Defense (DoD), perhaps in collaboration with other agencies, invest in new research and educational initiatives to develop and implement a new function, and perhaps a new hybrid discipline, of computational systems engineering. As software and computing have moved to the very center of system design, it is no longer feasible to treat these issues as mere component-level concerns. Rather, they must now be addressed at the highest level of system definition and development. That said, the traditional systems engineering issues of integrating across many other areas of expertise have not gone away. To succeed now requires an integration of expertise from traditional systems engineering disciplines and from the de facto systems engineering disciplines that have evolved in parallel in the computer sciences, notably but not only software engineering and cyber-physical systems. Neither discipline is configured to succeed on its own. A new synthesis is required.