A Middleware for Smart Environments

A smart environment is a context sensitive system based on ubiquitous computing, in which the environment interacts with its inhabitants through embedded dedicated devices. The design and construction of a smart environment requires the collaboration among several areas, such as (1) intelligent man-machine interfaces, (2) pervasive communications, (3) ambient intelligence, (4) scalable systems and (5) mobile computing. It can be very useful if a designer can abstract the required functionalities from these areas to design and build a smart environment. We propose a layer based middleware for mobile devices (mainly focusing on smart phones) for the intelligent interaction between devices. Each layer provides specific functionalities and serves as the ground upon which upper i.e. more abstract layers are built. We identify the following layers: (1) infrastructure and communications, (2) services and agents, (3) middleware services and (4) collective intelligence. We also propose a formalization of interactions for the specification of services in a smart environment, which is based on ambient calculus and also defines the relationships between layers.

[1]  Michel Banâtre,et al.  Ambient computing applications: an experience with the SPREAD approach , 2003, 36th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2003. Proceedings of the.

[2]  David Garlan,et al.  Task-Driven Computing , 2000 .

[3]  Harry Chen,et al.  An Intelligent Broker for Context-Aware Systems , 2003 .

[4]  Sven Apel,et al.  Towards the Development of Ubiquitous Middleware Product Lines , 2004, SEM.

[5]  William C. Mann,et al.  The Gator Tech Smart House: a programmable pervasive space , 2005, Computer.

[6]  Flávio S. Corrêa da Silva,et al.  Expressing systems capabilities for knowledge coordination , 2002, AAMAS '02.

[7]  Victor R. Lesser,et al.  Designing a Family of Coordination Algorithms , 1997, ICMAS.

[8]  David Garlan,et al.  Aura: an Architectural Framework for User Mobility in Ubiquitous Computing Environments , 2002, WICSA.

[9]  Jos de Bruijn,et al.  Web Service Modeling Ontology , 2005, Appl. Ontology.

[10]  Kazunori Takashio,et al.  Smart Device Collaboration for Ubiquitous Computing Environment , 2003 .

[11]  Françoise Sailhan,et al.  Developing Ambient Intelligence Systems: A Solution based on Web Services , 2004, Automated Software Engineering.

[12]  Bruce Edmonds,et al.  Interaction Model Language Definition , 2007, IJCAI 2007.

[13]  Franco Zambonelli,et al.  Coordination of Internet Agents: Models, Technologies, and Applications , 2014, Coordination of Internet Agents: Models, Technologies, and Applications.

[14]  Roy H. Campbell,et al.  Gaia: A Development Infrastructure for Active Spaces , 2001 .

[15]  Amy L. Murphy,et al.  LIME: Linda meets mobility , 1999, Proceedings of the 1999 International Conference on Software Engineering (IEEE Cat. No.99CB37002).

[16]  Mary Czerwinski,et al.  The New EasyLiving Project at Microsoft Research , 1998 .

[17]  Jianhua Ma,et al.  Towards a smart world and ubiquitous intelligence: A walkthrough from smart things to smart hyperspaces and UbicKids , 2005, Int. J. Pervasive Comput. Commun..

[18]  Agostino Poggi,et al.  Developing Multi-agent Systems with JADE , 2007, ATAL.

[19]  Gregory D. Abowd,et al.  The Aware Home: A Living Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing Research , 1999, CoBuild.