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

CONCEPTUALIZING CONTEXT FOR ADAPTIVE PERVASIVE COMMERCE

In retail, demographics are currently regarded as the most convenient base for successful personalized marketing. However, signs point to the dormant power of context recognition. While technologies that can sense the environment are advanced, questions such as what to sense and how to adapt context are largely unanswered. In this paper, we analyze the purchase context of a retail outlet and suggest a context model for adaptive pervasive commerce. Furthermore, we introduce one approach how to conceptualize context that may be applied to conceptualize context for adaptive pervasive advertising applications so that they really deliver on their potential: showing the right message to the right recipient at the right time

A Consolidated View of Context for Intelligent Systems

This paper's main objective is to consolidate the knowledge on context in the realm of intelligent systems, systems that are aware of their context and can adapt their behavior accordingly. We provide an overview and analysis of 36 context models that are heterogeneous and scattered throughout multiple fields of research. In our analysis, we identify five shared context categories: social context, location, time, physical context, and user context. In addition, we compare the context models with the context elements considered in the discourse on intelligent systems and find that the models do not properly represent the identified set of 3,741 unique context elements. As a result, we propose a consolidation of the findings from the 36 context models and the 3,741 unique context elements. The analysis reveals that there is a long tail of context categories that are considered only sporadically in context models. However, particularly these context elements in the long tail may be necessary for improving intelligent systems' context awareness

Diseño de Reglas Gramaticales para Transformar Documentos Técnicos Corporativos Escritos en Lenguaje Natural en Discursos Controlados

La educción de requisitos es una de las fases más importantes en el proceso de desarrollo de software. La revisión de documentos es una de las técnicas menos usadas para educir requisitos. La literatura sugiere usarla en esta fase sobre descripciones del dominio y documentos corporativos. Aplicando esta técnica, los analistas pueden extraer conocimiento del dominio e información del negocio. En este artículo se define un marco estructural de un tipo de documento técnico corporativo, relacionado con la especificación de procedimientos. A partir de este marco, se propone un conjunto de reglas gramaticales para transformar ciertas secciones del documento técnico en un discurso en el lenguaje controlado UN-Lencep. Estas reglas se pueden aplicar posteriormente en procesos de educción de requisitos a partir de la técnica de revisión de documentos

Designing context-aware systems: A method for understanding and analysing context in practice

NWO438-13-60Past research project

Context-aware Services for Mobile Devices: From Architecture Design to Empirical Inference

Currently, mobile devices are aware of user position, which can be provided to mobile apps for the development of tailored services known as Location-Based Services. Further advances on current Location-based Services (LBS), i.e. using any other information from the user such as gender, music preferences etc, may lead to transition from a Location-Based environment to a fully developed ContextAware environment.The current trend towards Context-aware Services (CAS) is reflected in academic research since more than twenty years as well as in the progress in Software Development Kits (SDKs) of the main mobile operating systems, where CAS frameworks are currently being used. However, there is no community agreement for modelling context CAS and little is known about the architecture of these context management frameworks of the mobile operating systems.Based on previous research in the area of CAS, I establish and analyse a reasoning architecture, the Context Engine (CE), that enables the main steps of designing and implementing context-aware services. The chief utility of CAS is their ability to formulate and encapsulate information, obtain user context through context acquisition tools and distribute it to third-party applications that build personalised services based on the provided information. The CE has the responsibility of selecting the optimal context acquisition tool to solve a concrete problem which is discussed in this dissertation.Furthermore, this thesis contributes to the development of context inference tools by studying two particular cases. The first case aims at inferring user (semantic) location information based on mobile phone usage data. This first case has been carried out in collaboration with Microsoft Finland, which provides a similar context inference solution to mobile developers through their Software Development Kit (SDK). The second case aims at inferring user information based on social network information, i.e. infer user information based on his or her connections. Both studies yield positive results and have the potential to be extended to obtain better context acquisition tools and, therefore, better user context

Evolving Software Systems for Self-Adaptation

There is a strong synergy between the concepts of evolution and adaptation in software engineering: software adaptation refers to both the current software being adapted and to the evolution process that leads to the new adapted software. Evolution changes for the purpose of adaptation are usually made at development or compile time, and are meant to handle predictable situations in the form of software change requests. On the other hand, software may also change and adapt itself based on the changes in its environment. Such adaptive changes are usually dynamic, and are suitable for dealing with unpredictable or temporary changes in the software's operating environment. A promising solution for software adaptation is to develop self-adaptive software systems that can manage changes dynamically at runtime in a rapid and reliable way. One of the main advantages of self-adaptive software is its ability to manage the complexity that stems from highly dynamic and nondeterministic operating environments. If a self-adaptive software system has been engineered and used properly, it can greatly improve the cost-effectiveness of software change through its lifespan. However, in practice, many of the existing approaches towards self-adaptive software are rather expensive and may increase the overall system complexity, as well as subsequent future maintenance costs. This means that in many cases, self-adaptive software is not a good solution, because its development and maintenance costs are not paid off. The situation is even worse in the case of making current (legacy) systems adaptive. There are several factors that have an impact on the cost-effectiveness and usability of self-adaptive software; however the main objective of this thesis is to make a software system adaptive in a cost-effective way, while keeping the target adaptive software generic, usable, and evolvable, so as to support future changes. In order to effectively engineer and use self-adaptive software systems, in this thesis we propose a new conceptual model for identifying and specifying problem spaces in the context of self-adaptive software systems. Based on the foundations of this conceptual model, we propose a model-centric approach for engineering self-adaptive software by designing a generic adaptation framework and a supporting evolution process. This approach is particularly tailored to facilitate and simplify the process of evolving and adapting current (legacy) software towards runtime adaptivity. The conducted case studies reveal the applicability and effectiveness of this approach in bringing self-adaptive behaviour into non-adaptive applications that essentially demand adaptive behaviour to sustain

Coherence check of behavioural specifications against specific properties of the operational context

In der Anforderungsspezifikation eines Systems werden Eigenschaften definiert, die das System an seiner Schnittstelle zur Umgebung aufweisen muss, um im Betrieb seinen Zweck zu erfüllen. Eine Vielzahl von Untersuchungen zeigt, dass Fehler in der Anforderungsspezifikation zu erheblichen negativen Konsequenzen sowohl im Entwicklungsprozess des Systems als auch im Systembetrieb führen können. Fehler in der Anforderungsspezifikation sind dabei oftmals auf Kohärenzbrüche gegenüber dem operationellen Kontext zurückzuführen, d. h. auf ungültige oder unvollständige Annahmen über die Umgebung, in der das System betrieben werden soll. Im Rahmen des Dissertationsvorhabens wurde ein teilautomatisierter Ansatz entwickelt, der darauf abzielt, Kohärenzbrüche in der Anforderungsspezifikation von Systemen gegenüber dem operationellen Kontexts dieser Systeme aufzudecken. Die Arbeit fokussiert dabei auf die Verhaltensspezifikation als Teil der Anforderungsspezifikation sowie auf Eigenschaften des operationellen Kontexts in der statisch-strukturellen Perspektive. Der entwickelte Ansatz setzt sich aus einem Rahmenwerk zur Modellierung des operationellen Kontexts in der statisch-strukturellen Perspektive und einem Katalog von Formalismen zusammen, durch deren Anwendung Kohärenzbrüche in der Verhaltensspezifikation teilautomatisiert aufgedeckt werden können. Zur Evaluation des Ansatzes wurde dieser exemplarisch auf die Verhaltensspezifikation eines von Komplexität und Umfang her praxistypischen Systems angewendet. Zum Nachweis der technischen Umsetzbarkeit des Ansatzes wird ein Werkzeugprototyp vorgestellt. Der entwickelte Ansatz liefert einen Beitrag im Hinblick auf Techniken zur differenzierten Modellierung des operationellen Kontexts von Systemen in der statisch-strukturellen Perspektive und zur teilautomatisierten analytischen Qualitätssicherung von Anforderungsspezifikationen.The requirements specification of a system contains the definition of properties the system must exhibit at its interfaces with the environment in order to meet its purpose during system operation. There is ample evidence in the literature that suggests that errors in the requirements specification may lead to serious negative consequences during the development process of the system as well as subsequently, during system operation. Errors in the requirements specification can often be traced back to the fact that the specification is not coherent with the operational context due to invalid or incomplete assumptions about the system’s operating environment. In the context of this dissertation, a semi-automated approach was developed, aiming at detecting coherence defects within a system’s requirements specification against its operational context. The focus of this thesis lies on the specification of the system’s behaviour as part of the requirements specification and on properties of the operational context in the structural perspective. An approach has been developed that consists of a framework for modelling the operational context in the structural perspective. Furthermore, a list of formalisms has been devised, which allow detecting coherence defects in the specification of the system’s behaviour in a partially automated way. For validation purposes, the approach was exemplarily applied to the specification of a system that renders a typical real-world example with regard to complexity and extent. To prove the technical feasibility of the approach, a tool prototype is presented. The dissertation provides a contribution with regard to techniques for modelling the operational context of systems in the structural perspective as well as for the partially automated, analytic quality assurance of requirements specification

Towards requirements engineering for context adaptive systems

Building realistic end user scenarios for ubiquitous computing applications entails large up-front investments. Many context adaptive applications so far fail to live up to their expectations. Firstly, this is due to poorly conceived development tools and methods compared to other, more mature domains. And secondly, they seem to be particularly prone to problems related to a discrepancy between user expectation and systems behavior. This unwanted behavior prevents the vision of an emerging trend of context aware and adaptive applications in ubiquitous computing to become reality. A good understanding of business and customer’s requirements may be of immense importance. This paper presents a model-based requirements engineering approach to systematically analyze and specify the basic system behavior as well as the adaptation behavior starting from customer and business needs. 1