A Software Factory in the Cloud for Pandemics and other Disasters - Initial Results and Future Directions

Pandemics such as COVID-19 and other disasters in this age require a wide range of cyber-physical solutions such as web portals, mobile apps, IoTs, robots and drones. These solutions need to be customized for different geographical locations with different capabilities and should be produced quickly and at massive scales to meet the specific demands of the disasters. To complicate matters further, several government policies and industry guidelines regulate the deployment and use of such solutions. It is virtually impossible to handcraft the needed solutions individually and manually. A factory model is needed to rapidly build highly customized solutions very much like the auto factories that build millions of highly customized cars to satisfy needed safety requirements. In the same vein, this paper presents initial results from a software factory in the cloud that has produced a Smart Global Village (SGV) with more than 700 smart hubs for 130 countries that span 12 sectors, including disaster management. These highly customized smart hubs, created by using the SPACE Factory in less than 20 minutes per hub, also collaborate with each other that leads to highly creative B2B collaborations at global level. The paper discusses initial results from creating the SGV sandbox by using a factory model and outlines future research directions.