Composition of context-aware services using policies and models

This paper presents a proof-of-the-concept of a novel means to develop in an easy way, to execute in a more pervasive way and to maintain in a more sustainable way context-aware services. The essence of this approach is the integration of the policy-based management (PBM) technique and the MDA (model-driven architecture) technique. The presence of policies grants context-aware services the high flexibility and adaptability as their nature, whereas the introduction of MDA for context-aware service information model fundamentally solves the information model puzzle of current PBM. MDA's middleware-neutral feature also benefits the smooth evolution of context-aware services as a kind of software. The preliminary case study has proved the positive feasibility of this approach.