AI-driven Management and MLOps for Networks and Services: Call for Papers for a Special Issue in the International Journal of Network Management
AI-driven Management and MLOps for Networks and Services: Call for Papers for a Special Issue in the International Journal of Network Management
Submission Deadline: 31 October 2026
Artificial Intelligence is rapidly transforming the way modern communication infrastructures are operated, optimized, secured, and managed. AI-driven Management and MLOps for Networks and Services are becoming central research topics as AI increasingly powers cloud-native platforms, edge computing environments, 5G and 6G systems, IoT deployments, and critical infrastructures.
To advance this rapidly evolving field, the International Journal of Network Management (IJNM) has launched a Special Issue dedicated to novel methods, architectures, platforms, and operational experiences related to AI-driven management and the lifecycle management of AI itself.
This Special Issue addresses one of the most important developments in network and service management today: AI is no longer only a tool for optimization. It is increasingly becoming part of operational decision-making and autonomous control loops. At the same time, AI models themselves have become operational assets that require monitoring, validation, deployment, governance, security, and continuous adaptation.
A Timely Research Topic
The scale, programmability, and heterogeneity of modern digital infrastructures continue to increase. Traditional management approaches are increasingly challenged by highly dynamic cloud-native systems, distributed edge infrastructures, large-scale IoT deployments, and emerging autonomous networks.
This evolution creates a dual challenge:
- How can AI improve the management of networks and services?
- How can we effectively manage the lifecycle of AI systems operating in production environments?
The convergence of AI-driven network management, AIOps, MLOps, and LLMOps is creating an entirely new research landscape at the intersection of networking, cloud computing, cybersecurity, distributed systems, and artificial intelligence.
The Cyber CNI Chaire considers these developments highly relevant for the future of cyber-secure, resilient, and trustworthy critical infrastructures.
Faster Visibility Through Continuous Publication
A significant advantage for authors is the International Journal of Network Management’s continuous publication model.
Under Wiley’s current publishing process, accepted papers are published online as soon as they complete the review and production process. Authors no longer need to wait for all Special Issue submissions to be reviewed and accepted before their work becomes available to the research community.
This means that high-quality submissions can benefit from:
- Rapid online publication after acceptance
- Earlier visibility within the community
- Faster dissemination of research results
- Earlier opportunities for citations and scientific impact
- The prestige and archival value of a journal publication without the traditional delay associated with special issues
Once all accepted papers have been published, Wiley will additionally create the Special Issue as a virtual collection, accompanied by an editorial from the Guest Editors that highlights the emerging research directions and key contributions across the issue.
Building on the Success of AIMLOps 2026
This Special Issue follows the successful AIMLOps 2026 Workshop held in conjunction with IEEE/IFIP NOMS 2026 in Rome.
The workshop brought together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to discuss topics including:
- AI-driven network and service management
- MLOps and LLMOps
- Explainable AI (XAI)
- Autonomous and zero-touch networks
- AI-powered cybersecurity
- Large Language Models for operations
- AI assurance and observability
- Sovereign cloud and AI infrastructures
- Interoperability and autonomous IoT systems
The workshop featured outstanding paper quality, highly engaging presentations, and exceptionally deep technical discussions. The scientific maturity of the presented work demonstrated that AI-driven management and the operational management of AI itself are rapidly becoming defining challenges for future communication systems.
In fact, dedicated journal special issues directly associated with workshops remain relatively rare within the networking community. This Special Issue was created because of both the exceptional relevance of the topic and the outstanding quality of the research contributions presented at AIMLOps 2026.
Authors who presented at AIMLOps 2026 are particularly encouraged to submit substantially extended versions of their work.
Why Submit?
The International Journal of Network Management is one of the established and respected journals in the network and service management community. For decades, it has served as a leading venue for high-quality research on the management, operation, maintenance, and security of communication networks and distributed systems.
Publishing an extended journal article allows authors to:
- Present significantly more comprehensive evaluations
- Include additional datasets and deployment experiences
- Expand methodological and architectural details
- Provide deeper theoretical foundations
- Discuss broader implications and lessons learned
- Create a long-term archival reference for their work
The journal explicitly welcomes substantially extended versions of previously published conference and workshop papers, provided significant new contributions are included and clearly documented.
Topics of Interest
The Special Issue welcomes original contributions on topics including, but not limited to:
- AI-driven monitoring, analysis, and control for networks and services
- Machine learning for service assurance, fault management, and root-cause analysis
- Large Language Models and foundation models for network and service operations
- Reinforcement learning for adaptive orchestration and autonomous control
- AI-driven management for cloud-native, edge, 5G/6G, and IoT environments
- Data pipelines, model training, validation, deployment, and continuous delivery for network AI
- Monitoring, observability, and drift management for AI models in production
- Governance, accountability, and compliance for operational AI
- Security and privacy in AI lifecycle management and inference pipelines
- Robustness against adversarial manipulation and model misuse
- Resource-efficient AI for network and service management
- Explainability, transparency, and trust in AI-driven operational decisions
- Benchmarks, datasets, testbeds, and evaluation methodologies
- Operational case studies and deployment experiences
Relevance for Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructures
Many of the challenges addressed by this Special Issue are directly aligned with the research mission of the Cyber CNI Chaire.
Future critical infrastructures will increasingly rely on AI-driven decision-making, autonomous operations, and intelligent orchestration. At the same time, these systems must remain trustworthy, resilient, explainable, secure, and compliant with regulatory requirements.
Research topics such as AI lifecycle management, AI observability, explainable AI, autonomous operations, digital sovereignty, and AI-enabled cybersecurity are therefore becoming fundamental building blocks for the next generation of cyber-secure critical infrastructures.
Useful Links
Special Issue Call for Papers
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/10991190/homepage/call-for-papers/si-2026-000414
International Journal of Network Management
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10991190
AIMLOps Workshop
https://aimlops.future-iot.org/
Cyber CNI Chaire
https://cybercni.fr
Special Issue Information
Special Issue: AI-driven Management and MLOps for Networks and Services
Journal: International Journal of Network Management (Wiley)
Submission Deadline: 31 October 2026
Guest Editors
Marc-Oliver Pahl
IMT Atlantique, France
Hanan Lutfiyya
University of Western Ontario, Canada
Stuart Clayman
University College London, United Kingdom
We look forward to receiving submissions that advance the state of the art in AI-driven network and service management and help shape the future of intelligent, resilient, and trustworthy digital infrastructures.
Marc-Oliver is an adjunct professor of Carleton University in Canada. Marc-Oliver’s research focus is on a holistic approach to cybersecurity. He is an experienced teacher and an eLearning pioneer, holding several teaching awards.
Marc-Oliver holds a Diploma from University of Tübingen and a PhD from Technical University of Munich.
Marc-Oliver is Vice President of the German Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) (https://germany.acm.org/). He heads the Future Education activities of the German-French Academy for the Industry of the Future (https://future-industry.org/).
Marc-Oliver’s research focus is on a holistic approach to cybersecurity. He works on security-by-design, anomaly detection, human-in-the-loop, and automation. His goal is making cybersecurity manageable, resulting in highly resilient and reliable systems. Marc-Oliver publishes regularly in the network and service management and security communities.
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