SHIP - A Logic-Based Language and Tool to Program Smart Environments

The increasing availability of smart objects demands for flexible mechanisms to orchestrate different types of these objects to smart environments. As smart objects are typically not aware of each other, an orchestrating platform has to manage common resources, to harmonize the individual behavior of the acting objects, and to combine their activities to an intelligent team work. This paper presents a corresponding framework to implement such an orchestrating platform. It provides a concurrent programming language representing states in Description Logics and state transitions as logical updates enabling deductive support to infer non-explicitly represented knowledge. It uses temporal logic to suspend execution of a process for a particular evolution of the global state that is specified by a LTL formula. Since a process can fork into subprocesses this provides a mechanism for runtime verification by splitting a process into a subprocess executing some critical program and another parallel subprocess monitoring the first one by waiting for the desired evolution of states specified in its LTL formula.