Towards Programming and Verification for Activity-Oriented Smart Home Systems

Smart home systems are becoming increasingly popular. Software engineering of such systems hence becomes a prominent challenge. In this engineering paradigm, users are often interested in considering sensor states while they are performing various activities. Existing works have proposed initial efforts on incremental development method for activity-oriented requirements. However, there is no systematic way of ensuring reliability and security of such systems which may be developed by various developers and may execute in a complex environment. Some properties, especially those including timing constraints, need to be satisfied. In this paper, we introduce Actom, a framework for identification of activity-oriented requirements and runtime verification. Actom supports the development of the mapping between activities and required sensor readings (activity-sensor mapping). At runtime, Actom receives results of activity recognition and is able to trigger actuators to provide the required physical conditions for the activities, as determined by the activity-sensor mapping. Moreover, Actom continuously monitors whether activity-sensor mapping holds over a time period during the activity. We also discuss the evaluation plan to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of Actom. The end product will be a systematic framework to facilitate the development of activity-oriented requirements and monitor properties with timing constraints to improve reliability and security.