A Development Framework for Adaptive Pervasive Applications Position Paper
Kurt Geihs · 2007
I. MOTIVATION Pervasive computing applications need to cope with the dynamics of their environment: For example, applications may want to adapt when connectivity changes, new services appear, user requirements and preferences change, or some applicationspecific sensor value exceeds a predefined threshold. Pervasive applications are context-aware and react during runtime to changes in their environment in order to maintain their usefulness and quality of service. While context-awareness as such has been the subject of intensive studies for more than a decade [3], the development of adaptive applications that are able to adjust themselves to context changes still is a complex and not well understood task. Software engineering techniques are needed in order to design and implement adaptivity and variability into the application software. The recently started EC-funded project MUSIC (“SelfAdapting Applications for Mobile Users in Ubiquitous Computing Environments”) develops a comprehensive development framework for adaptive applications in pervasive computing environments [7]. The framework shall facilitate the systematic development of software that seamlessly adapts to the highly dynamic user and execution context, and maintains a high level of usefulness across context changes. In this position paper we discuss the main requirements and goals of MUSIC, and we briefly explain why we are confident to reach our goals by extending the results of earlier projects in this realm.