Requirements engineering for intelligent environments

The field of Intelligent Environments (IE) is maturing to a level at which a range of sophisticated applications are emerging. Such systems aim to be context-aware, especially being adaptable to possibly unpredictable circumstances. An area of significant potential is that of ‘ambient assisted living’, with significant advances in fields such as smart spaces, classrooms, and assisted living space for the elderly or people with disabilities. In recent years, however, it has been recognised that numerous IE systems have been developed without adopting best practises from software engineering. The work presented here focuses on the requirements engineering stage and presents a framework for IE systems in which an intrinsic component is context-awareness. Whilst the framework is intended as a general IE model, we are currently applying it to the specific area of ambient assisted living and it is being employed on the POSEIDON project. It is anticipated that such real world application of the model will help endorse its conception and facilitate further refinement of the framework

Ingeniería de requerimientos aplicada a sistemas sensibles al contexto : Revisión de la literatura

El objetivo de este trabajo de investigación consiste en proponer un modelo para la especificación de requerimientos para un sistema sensible al contexto. Este tipo de sistemas, que adaptan su comportamiento en función de los cambios captados en el entorno, resultan complejos a la hora de entender y definir el dominio de la aplicación. Los métodos tradicionales de ingeniería de requerimientos no contemplan ciertas necesidades, propias de estas aplicaciones, como ser entre otras la definición de servicios sensibles al contexto, tipos de contexto, calidad y estado del contexto. El grupo de investigación se encuentra analizando los métodos y las herramientas propuestas por varios autores, quienes abordan el tema desde distintos enfoques. La investigación se plantea basándola en tres pilares, la especificación de requerimientos, los sistemas sensibles al contexto y un caso práctico de aplicación, cuyo dominio aún no ha sido definido.Eje: Ingeniería de SoftwareRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Engineering context-aware systems and applications:A survey

Context-awareness is an essential component of systems developed in areas like Intelligent Environments, Pervasive & Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence. In these emerging fields, there is a need for computerized systems to have a higher understanding of the situations in which to provide services or functionalities, to adapt accordingly. The literature shows that researchers modify existing engineering methods in order to better fit the needs of context-aware computing. These efforts are typically disconnected from each other and generally focus on solving specific development issues. We encourage the creation of a more holistic and unified engineering process that is tailored for the demands of these systems. For this purpose, we study the state-of-the-art in the development of context-aware systems, focusing on: (A) Methodologies for developing context-aware systems, analyzing the reasons behind their lack of adoption and features that the community wish they can use; (B) Context-aware system engineering challenges and techniques applied during the most common development stages; (C) Context-aware systems conceptualization

Engineering context-aware systems and applications: a survey

Context-awareness is an essential component of systems developed in areas like Intelligent Environments, Pervasive & Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence. In these emerging fields, there is a need for computerized systems to have a higher understanding of the situations in which to provide services or functionalities, to adapt accordingly. The literature shows that researchers modify existing engineering methods in order to better fit the needs of context-aware computing. These efforts are typically disconnected from each other and generally focus on solving specific development issues. We encourage the creation of a more holistic and unified engineering process that is tailored for the demands of these systems. For this purpose, we study the state-of-the-art in the development of context-aware systems, focusing on: A) Methodologies for developing context-aware systems, analyzing the reasons behind their lack of adoption and features that the community wish they can use; B) Context aware system engineering challenges and techniques applied during the most common development stages; C) Context aware systems conceptualization

A software development framework for context-aware systems

The beginning of the new century has been characterised by the miniaturisation and accessibility of electronics, which has enabled its widespread usage around the world. This technological background is progressively materialising the future of the remainder of the century, where industry-based societies have been moving towards information-based societies. Information from users and their environment is now pervasively available, and many new research areas have born in order to shape the potential of such advancements. Particularly, context-aware computing is at the core of many areas such as Intelligent Environments, Ambient Intelligence, Ambient Assisted Living or Pervasive Computing. Embedding contextual awareness into computers promises a fundamental enhancement in the interaction between computers and humans. While traditional computers require explicit commands in order to operate, contextually aware computers could also use information from the background and the users to provide services according to the situation. But embedding this contextual awareness has many unresolved challenges. The area of context-aware computing has attracted the interest of many researchers that have presented different approaches to solve particular aspects on the implementation of this technology. The great corpus of research in this direction indicates that context-aware systems have different requirements than those of traditional computing. Approaches for developing context-aware systems are typically scattered or do not present compatibility with other approaches. Existing techniques for creating context-aware systems also do not focus on covering all the different stages of a typical software development life-cycle. The contribution of this thesis is towards the foundation layers of a more holistic approach, that tries to facilitate further research on the best techniques for developing these kinds of systems. The approach presents a framework to support the development not only with methodologies, but with open-source tools that facilitate the implementation of context-aware systems in mobile and stationary platforms

Mango: A model-driven approach to engineering green Mobile Cloud Applications

With the resource constrained nature of mobile devices and the resource abundant offerings of the cloud, several promising optimisation techniques have been proposed by the green computing research community. Prominent techniques and unique methods have been developed to offload resource/computation intensive tasks from mobile devices to the cloud. Most of the existing offloading techniques can only be applied to legacy mobile applications as they are motivated by existing systems. Consequently, they are realised with custom runtimes which incur overhead on the application. Moreover, existing approaches which can be applied to the software development phase, are difficult to implement (based on manual process) and also fall short of overall (mobile to cloud) efficiency in software qualityattributes or awareness of full-tier (mobile to cloud) implications.To address the above issues, the thesis proposes a model-driven architecturefor integration of software quality with green optimisation in Mobile Cloud Applications (MCAs), abbreviated as Mango architecture. The core aim of the architecture is to present an approach which easily integrates software quality attributes (SQAs) with the green optimisation objective of Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC). Also, as MCA is an application domain which spans through the mobile and cloud tiers; the Mango architecture, therefore, takesinto account the specification of SQAs across the mobile and cloud tiers, for overall efficiency. Furthermore, as a model-driven architecture, models can be built for computation intensive tasks and their SQAs, which in turn drives the development – for development efficiency. Thus, a modelling framework (called Mosaic) and a full-tier test framework (called Beftigre) were proposed to automate the architecture derivation and demonstrate the efficiency of Mango approach. By use of real world scenarios/applications, Mango has been demonstrated to enhance the MCA development process while achieving overall efficiency in terms of SQAs (including mobile performance and energy usage compared to existing counterparts)