A Novel Analysis Procedure for Context-Aware Applications in Ubiquitous Environments: Application to a Smart Building Case Study

Abstract

Research in the development of context-aware applications has gained significant attention, in which context awareness should be taken into account to adapt these applications to the requirements of the environments and the users. The development of context-aware applications is based on a control loop with four phases. Collecting context information (phase 1), analyzing context information to detect changes (phase 2), deciding adaptation actions (phase 3) and executing the corresponding adaptation actions (phase 4) to deal with the changes. In this paper, we discuss the analysis phase (phase 2) and we propose an analysis approach. The proposed analysis approach is illustrated by an analysis procedure that aims to offer a support for application designers allowing them to design easily context-aware applications. The analysis procedure is achieved by a sequence of steps performed by the designers. We have also implemented an analysis module that aims at guiding the programmers when developing context-aware applications. To motivate the use of our approach, we present a case study related to smart buildings. Finally, we show the effectiveness of our analysis approach through experiments related to the processing time of our analysis module as well as the memory and the CPU overhead.