The Application Propagation Environment (APEx) aims to increase the uptake and reuse of RD application project results, especially algorithms and workflows, and ensure their long-term availability to the EO community.
To facilitate this, APEx will build on European cloud-based EO platform services offered in the Network of Resources (NoR) and integrate, develop, and provide dedicated services such as facilitating algorithm hosting and on-demand execution, algorithm maturity enhancement or the instantiation of working environments.
APEx will develop and provide a set of services categorised as (1) instantiation services and (2) propagation services.
As part of the instantiation services, APEx will be able to provide managed, and highly configurable working environments that correspond to the common needs of the ESA RD application projects in order to share and maintain project results with the community. To achieve this, APEx will integrate existing EO platform services from the NoR portfolio with Common Architecture Building Blocks and, in some cases, also newly developed services (i.e., “delta” services, currently not existing in the NoR portfolio). The APEx instantiation services will be dynamically instantiated/deployed and shall be configurable in terms of selected components. They will allow for tailoring in “look feel” according to specific project or application contexts.
As part of the propagation services, APEx will facilitate the persistent availability of RD application algorithms to the community by coordinating and aggregating algorithms that will be hosted in APEx compliant and interoperable EO platform environments and continuously monitor their availability and functioning. The central APEx portal will aggregate and index all hosted services and make them persistently accessible to the community along with other project results. Other APEx propagation services include the Algorithm Maturity Enhancement. This service will develop and offer a streamlined solution for enhancing RD algorithms in terms of computational performance and efficiency following a dedicated process that includes technical source code analysis, benchmarking, and refactoring. Further propagation services include the Cloudification of EO toolboxes and support for algorithm intercomparison exercises.
Generally, APEx services shall extend the ESA NoR portfolio for not yet existing service types needed for instantiation and propagation. For the initial 2-year contract instantiation services shall be supplied to at least 20 projects within this current APEX activity, with the aim to on-board these as NoR services within the initial contract. For the 3-year extension period, such NoR-onboarded services can directly be requested by the projects via the NoR and the APEx activity only has to cover service evolution.
Learn more about this Invitation To Tender on the esa-star Publication page.