Development of situation-aware application software for ubiquitous computing environments

Ubiquitous computing represents the concept of computing everywhere, making computing and communication essentially transparent to the users. Applications in this type of environments are context sensitive. They use various contexts to adaptively communicate with each other across multiple network environments, such as mobile ad hoc networks, Internet, and mobile phone networks. The property of context-sensitivity often becomes inadequate in these applications, where combinations of multiple contexts and users' actions need to be analyzed over a period of time. Situation-awareness in application software is considered as a desirable property to overcome this limitation. In addition to being context-sensitive, situation-aware applications can respond to both current and historical relationships of specific contexts and device-actions. Currently, no well-defined concept of situation and no general method exist to facilitate the development of situation-aware application software for ubiquitous computing environments. In this paper, the concept of situation is formalized, and an approach to developing situation-aware application software is presented. The approach utilizes our reconfigurable context-sensitive middleware, and is illustrated by an example on Smart Classroom.