The Sixth International Joint Conference on Advances in Engineering and Technology (AET-2015)
Abstract
Context-aware systems (CASs) have become a reality thanks to the development of smart software and hardware
to assist the users in various real life activities. The proliferation of context-aware services has led to the emergence of
environments where services are made available for usage anywhere and at any time. CASs have the ability to capture users’
contexts and use their instance values to provide self-adaptive services in response to context changes. Modelling and
documenting the structure of such a system during the design phase is vital for system validation, testing, maintenance and
version management. The Unified Modelling Language (UML) is the de facto industrial standard for system modelling and
development. The UML class diagrams provide notations for modelling graphically the structure of a system in terms of
classes and the relationships between them. However, these notations are insufficient to model the structure of CASs. This
paper proposes a new set of notations to represent context and context-awareness and their relationships with classes in class
diagrams. Hence, the structure of CASs can be specified, visualized, constructed, and documented distinctively during system
development. The proposed approach is evaluated using real-world case studies
