Context-Aware IoT System Development Approach Based on Meta-Modeling and Reinforcement Learning: A Smart Home Case Study

Abstract

Integrating context awareness into the Internet of Things systems is essential for enhancing their adaptability to their context, particularly their user preferences and behaviors. This paper proposes an approach to model and develop context-aware self-adaptive IoT systems, capable of adapting their actions according to their users’ preferences. The approach consists of three main axes. The first axis involves establishing an overview of the system architecture that provides a high-level understanding of the various components of a context-aware IoT system. The second axis concerns the creation of a context-aware IoT systems meta-model, encapsulating the essential elements, relationships, and dependencies governing context awareness within the IoT system in a domain-independent manner. The third axis proposes a reinforcement learning reasoning process to enable intelligent decision-making within con-text-aware IoT systems. To validate the feasibility of the proposed approach, a simulation was conducted using the OpenAI Gym framework to emulate a context-aware smart home system. The results highlight the feasibility of the approach, and its potential to enhance real-life IoT systems’ awareness of their users’ context.