Concept-Oriented Research and Development in Information Technology

Foreword

In the early 1970s, information technology (IT) was applied in the support or management of various operations in public utilities, including the generation and distribution of electricity, transportation, telecommunications, manufacturing, broadcasting, and other areas of social infrastructure. As IT applications began to extend into many aspects of life and society, helping to automate routine daily functions, there was a widespread belief that IT could help solve the inherent problems in social infrastructure. However, the increasing complexity of IT systems has created problems such as inflexibility for system changes, limitations in expandability of functions, and bottlenecks in availability of IT procedures. Some of these problems were resolved through the development and application of improved systems engineering and software methodologies and techniques. Nevertheless, the fundamental issue of system complexity could not be resolved. As IT applications expanded to accommodate online, real-time infrastructures, total system availability became a major issue. Systems had to be reliable, and even if some functions failed, the total system had to continue working. In the data processing systems of the time, however, it was neither simple nor easy to keep a total system working all the time even after a partial failure. This proved to be an additional system issue.

In 1977, Professor Kinji Mori, the editor and one of the authors of this book, proposed a new system ...