Towards a Tool-based Development Methodology for Pervasive Computing Applications

Despite much progress, developing a pervasive computing application remains a challenge because of a lack of conceptual frameworks and supporting tools. This challenge involves coping with heterogeneous devices, overcoming the intricacies of distributed systems technologies, working out an architecture for the application, encoding it in a program, writing specific code to test the application, and finally deploying it. This paper presents a design language and a tool suite covering the development life-cycle of a pervasive computing application. The design language allows to define a taxonomy of area-specific building-blocks, abstracting over their heterogeneity. This language also includes a layer to define the architecture of an application, following an architectural pattern commonly used in the pervasive computing domain. Our underlying methodology assigns roles to the stakeholders, providing separation of concerns. Our tool suite includes a compiler that takes design artifacts written in our language as input and generates a programming framework that supports the subsequent development stages, namely implementation, testing, and deployment. Our methodology has been applied on a wide spectrum of areas. Based on these experiments, we assess our approach through three criteria: expressiveness, usability, and productivity

A model-driven approach for constructing ambient assisted-living multi-agent systems customized for Parkinson patients

The Parkinson disease affects some people, especially in the last years of their lives. Ambient assisted living systems can support them, especially in the middle stages of the disease. However, these systems usually need to be customized for each Parkinson patient. In this context, the current work follows the model-driven engineering principles to achieve this customized development. It represents each patient with a model. This is transformed into an agent-based model, from which a skeleton of programming code is generated. A case study illustrates this approach. Moreover, 24 engineers expert in model-driven engineering, multi-agent systems and/or health experienced the current approach alongside the three most similar works, by implementing actual systems. Some of these systems were tested by Parkinson patients. The results showed that (1) the current approach reduced the development time, (2) the developed system satisfied a higher percentage of the requirements established for certain Parkinson patients, (3) the usability increased, (4) the performance of the systems improved taking response time into account, and (5) the developers considered that the underlying metamodel is more appropriate for the current goal

A Multi-Agent System Architecture for Sensor Networks

The design of the control systems for sensor networks presents important challenges. Besides the traditional problems about how to process the sensor data to obtain the target information, engineers need to consider additional aspects such as the heterogeneity and high number of sensors, and the flexibility of these networks regarding topologies and the sensors in them. Although there are partial approaches for resolving these issues, their integration relies on ad hoc solutions requiring important development efforts. In order to provide an effective approach for this integration, this paper proposes an architecture based on the multi-agent system paradigm with a clear separation of concerns. The architecture considers sensors as devices used by an upper layer of manager agents. These agents are able to communicate and negotiate services to achieve the required functionality. Activities are organized according to roles related with the different aspects to integrate, mainly sensor management, data processing, communication and adaptation to changes in the available devices and their capabilities. This organization largely isolates and decouples the data management from the changing network, while encouraging reuse of solutions. The use of the architecture is facilitated by a specific modelling language developed through metamodelling. A case study concerning a generic distributed system for fire fighting illustrates the approach and the comparison with related work

Model-Driven Methodology for Rapid Deployment of Smart Spaces based on Resource-Oriented Architectures

Advances in electronics nowadays facilitate the design of smart spaces based on physical mash-ups of sensor and actuator devices. At the same time, software paradigms such as Internet of Things (IoT) and Web of Things (WoT) are motivating the creation of technology to support the development and deployment of web-enabled embedded sensor and actuator devices with two major objectives: (i) to integrate sensing and actuating functionalities into everyday objects, and (ii) to easily allow a diversity of devices to plug into the Internet. Currently, developers who are applying this Internet-oriented approach need to have solid understanding about specific platforms and web technologies. In order to alleviate this development process, this research proposes a Resource-Oriented and Ontology-Driven Development (ROOD) methodology based on the Model Driven Architecture (MDA). This methodology aims at enabling the development of smart spaces through a set of modeling tools and semantic technologies that support the definition of the smart space and the automatic generation of code at hardware level. ROOD feasibility is demonstrated by building an adaptive health monitoring service for a Smart Gym

Applying a model-based methodology to develop web-based systems of systems

Systems of Systems (SoS) are emerging applications composed by subsystems that interacts in a distributed and heterogeneous environment. Web-based technologies are a current trend to achieve SoS user interaction. Model Driven Web Engineering (MDWE) is the application of Model Driven Engineering (MDE) into the Web development domain. This paper presents a MDWE methodology to include Web-based interaction into SoS development. It's composed of ten models and seven model transformations and it's fully implemented in a support tool for its usage in practice. Quality aspects covered through the traceability from the requirements to the nal code are exposed. The feasibility of the approach is validated by its application into a real-world project. A preliminary analysis of potential benets (reduction of eort, time, cost; improve of quality; design vs code ratio, etc) is done by comparison to other project as an initial hypothesis for a future planned experimentation research.Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad TIN2013-46928-C3- 3-RMinisterio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad TIN2015-71938-RED

Beyond Enjoyment: A Cognitive-Emotional Perspective of Gamification

The success of gamified systems depends on their ability to engage players by eliciting both positive and negative emotions, but little guidance exists on creating emotional experiences through gamified design. This paper reviews work in psychology and neuroscience to highlight the interactive processes of cognition and emotion, and describes their relevance to gamification. Drawing on a model of the cognitive structure of emotions, and the mechanics-dynamics-emotions (MDE) framework for gamification, this paper advances a cognitive-emotional perspective of gamification and provides general propositions and directions for future research