Exploiting emergent technologies to create systems that meet shifting expectations

Properly combined, today’s emerging technologies can potentially lead to systems that adapt quickly and smoothly to ongoing shifts in user requirements and expectations through improving sensing and analytics and utilizing advanced software innovations and service orientation to support dynamic reconfigurations. To produce a system flexible enough to continually meet evolving expectations, various emergent technologies need to be assembled in a coherent fashion based on the capabilities and flexibilities they afford. We outline a framework in which the many activities and choices involved from design to execution and usage of a system can be re-positioned in relation to each other in order to achieve different kinds of flexibility and adaptiveness, taking advantage of data available from sensing mechanisms. An example from the transportation domain is used as an illustration.