A self-aware approach to context management in pervasive platforms

Pervasive computing envisions environments where computers are blended into everyday objects in order to provide added-value services to people. Already today, there is a growing number of advanced embedded systems around us, extended with computing and communication capabilities. However, pervasive applications raise major challenges in term of software engineering and remain hard to develop, deploy, execute, and maintain. In particular, smart home platforms must be autonomic because their management cannot be done by end users who do not possess the necessary skills. In this paper, we propose to handle context management in a service-oriented pervasive platform by defining a self-aware solution and associated mechanisms. Our approach is illustrated with a smart home example implemented in our pervasive platform iCasa.