Modern buildings are equipped with multiple systems, which are dedicated to improve quality of living for inhabitants and to facilitate performance of daily duties for maintenance personnel. Yet the variety of the systems causes the bulky informational flow, which may result informational tense to the user, time lost and increase of errors. To make life comfortable in a smart house, the inhabitants of the building should have an access to the simple and intuitive control and monitoring of the apartment, and the maintenance personnel should have a handily informational support for the prioritizing and efficient performance of the maintenance tasks. Thus, there is a need in intelligent management of information flow to provide data to the users with regards to the context like for instance on-going situation and goals, user's intentions, state and role in the system. This paper proposes framework of contextaware middleware as a solution for information management in the system. Context-awareness is achieved with ontological knowledge models of the system and two-level reasoning upon the ontologies. The enabled technologies are discussed with relation to the use case, which is a combination of smart home and elderly care services. Future steps towards framework realization end the paper.
Automation industry is moving towards more complex systems which are posing new challenges for operation from both machine and human perspectives. A group of challenges is related to management of the overwhelming information flow and to usability of the systems, and context-aware solutions have been recently introduced to the automation field in order to cope with challenges of this kind. The context awareness is seen as a solution which would allow to both the technological system and the human operator to infer the optimal decisions and to behave in the most effective way. In order to reach this capability, the external physical world and the system must be
described in a way both interpretable for humans and machines. Ambition of this paper is to contribute to the context-aware (re)configuration of the system with a tool, w h i c h i s d e s i g n e d t o i m p r o v e t h e e f f i c i e n c y o f t h econfiguration phase of a context-aware system. The tool provides a solution to configure and model the field devices of a system via automatically generated ontologies. This research is a part of a device management framework for a building automation use case, which is targeting to support controlling decisions of dwellers, technical support and social services.
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