By Invite Only: Special Issue on Internetware 2026

Internet is open, dynamic, and meets a constantly changing environment. These characteristics impose new requirements on software over Internet. The goals or values of software paradigm is to better utilize hardware capabilities or runtime features, as well as to provide a more expressive and natural computing model from the perspective of application domain. In that sense, software paradigm can be considered as a reflection of the runtime environment and application domain. When the dominant network environment changed from Intranet to Internet, software paradigm shifts from object-oriented to component-based and service-oriented. Therefore, software paradigm is very related to environment changes such as hardware and human itself. The new software paradigm is needed for Internet, and it is called as Internetware. Internetware is constructed by a set of autonomic software entities distributed over the Internet, and a set of connectors enabling the collaborating among these entities in various manners.

In recent years, intelligent information fusion and artificial intelligence have become increasingly important in large-scale and ubiquitous computing environments. Advances in computational power, machine learning techniques, and the availability of massive datasets have led to the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), which are transforming the way software systems interact with data, users, and execution environments. LLMs are blurring the boundary between human and machine-generated content and are opening new opportunities for Internetware systems, particularly in human–cyber–physical ubiquitous computing scenarios. These developments raise new research challenges in software architecture, dependability, performance, trustworthiness, and system governance.

Invited Submissions and Review Process

Authors should prepare their manuscript according to the Instructions for Authors available from the Journal’s submission guidelines https://link.springer.com/journal/10664/submission-guidelines. Submitted papers should present original, unpublished work, relevant to one of the topics of the special issue. All submitted papers will be evaluated on the basis of relevance, significance of contribution, technical quality, scholarship, and quality of presentation by at least two independent reviewers. It is the policy of the journal that no submission, or substantially overlapping submission, be published or be under review at another journal or conference at any time during the review process.

Please note that the authors of selected papers presented at Internetware 2026 are invited to submit an extended version of their contributions by taking into consideration both the reviewers’ comments on their conference paper, and the feedback received during presentation at the conference. It is worth clarifying that the extended version is expected to contain a substantial scientific contribution, e.g., in the form of new algorithms, experiments or qualitative/quantitative comparisons, and that neither verbatim transfer of large parts of the conference paper nor reproduction of already published figures will be tolerated.

The extended versions of Internetware 2026 papers will undergo the standard, rigorous journal review process and be accepted only if well-suited to the topic of this special issue and meeting the scientific level of the journal. Final decisions on all papers are made by the Editor in Chief.

Deadlines

Jan 7 2027: submission deadline
Mar 8 2027: first round of review (tentative)
May 7 2027: revision due

Guest Editors

Schahram Dustdar, TU Wien, Austria, dustdar@dsg.tuwien.ac.at
Xiaoning Du, Monash University, Australia, Xiaoning.Du@monash.edu (Lead Guest Editor)
Xiaoyuan Xie, Wuhan University, China, xxie@whu.edu.cn