Software platforms

Abstract

Ambient Intelligence is an emerging user-centric service provision paradigm that aims at enhancing the quality of life by seamlessly offering relevant information and services to the mobile user, anywhere and at anytime. The ubiquitous property applied to both computing and networking implies a useful, pleasant, and unobtrusive presence of the system everywhere-at home, en route, in public spaces, at work. Omnipresence of the system entails further its capacity to integrate diverse, heterogeneous computing and networking facilities, and to provide service in an ad hoc way, where the users and the system have no mutual a priori knowledge. While a number of base enablers such as wearable and handheld computers, wireless communication, and sensing mechanisms are already commercially available for deploying base infrastructures supporting the AmI vision, the development of AmI software systems still raises numerous scientific and technical challenges due to the distinguishing features of Ambient Intelligence, which may be encapsulated in the above introduced notions: mobility, heterogeneity, ad hoc nature, ubiquity, and usercentrism, where dynamics shall be added as a global property encompassed by all the others. These notions and their special meaning in Ambient Intelligence are extensively discussed in Sect. 8.2 of this chapter from the standpoint of software systems. More specifically, two major paradigms in the software domain, namely software architectures (SA) and middleware, are identified as most suitable instruments towards mastering the distinguishing features of Ambient Intelligence. Specific requirements for SA and middleware towards Ambient Intelligence are then elicited out of a brief overview of the state of the art in these two fields. Further, drawing from fundamental principles of SA and middleware and the identified requirements, a generic architectural framework for AmI software systems is outlined; it comprises a number of architectural entities abstracting essential features of AmI infrastructures, and a set of conceptual viewpoints allowing the methodical study of these infrastructures. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.