Section: New Results

Context-awareness and Ambient Intelligence Software

Participants : Laurence Duchien, Sébastien Mosser, Clément Quinton.

Context-aware applications are applications that can react to changes on their environment. To achieve such reacting behavior, several challenges have to be faced in terms of: context management, support for dynamic reconfiguration, automation of development, and a consistent development process. One possible way to face those challenges is to use the principles of Software Product Line (SPL) and specifically dynamic SPL (DSPL). DSPLs focus on variability management and aim at deriving different products from a same product family. Additionally, DSPLs allow for products to be derived both at design and at runtime. This enables applications to be adapted during execution and dynamically fit new requirements or resource changes. In [16] we have proposed an approach to unify adaptation at design and at runtime based on Aspect Oriented Modeling. Our approach proposes a unified aspect metamodel and a platform that realizes two different weaving processes to achieve design and runtime adaptations. This approach is used in a Dynamic Software Product Line which derives products that can be configured at design time and adapted at runtime in order to dynamically fit new requirements or resource changes. Such products are implemented using the Service Component Architecture and Java. Finally, we have illustrated the use of our approach based on an adaptive e-shopping scenario. This work corresponds to Carlos Parra's PhD thesis [11] and is partially funded by the CAPPUCINO project. Finally, in [40] , we have proposed to develop an application for mobile devices using Software Product Lines (SPL). Considering variation factors, SPL allows the conception and the development of a software products family minimizing realization cost and time. The result is the APPLIDE framework, which provides SPL for smartphones, and we show how it works with a short demonstration.