Opportunistic sensor interpretation in a virtual smart environment

Abstract

Smart environments interpret data from sensors to determine users' context. A relevant issue for their development is how to deal with the changes they experience at runtime. Components can be added, change or fail at runtime, modifying the system topology. These changes in turn modify the available information, providing new or redundant data or making impossible to calculate some pieces of the context. Opportunistic planning methods address these issues monitoring the context and suspending or resolving goals when the appropriate conditions are met. Using this approach, a smart room is able to wait and take advantage of changes in the context of the system to achieve goals that it was not able to accomplish before. This paper describes the development and testing of this context-aware behavior using FAERIE, a framework for context management intended to provide a general architecture. The sample application runs over UbikSim, which is a smart environment simulator for testing and validation. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.