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Domotics, concerned with the realization of intelligent home environments, is a novel field which can highly benefit from solutions inspired by service-oriented principles to enhance the convenience and security of modern home residents. In this work, we present an architecture for a smart home, starting from the lower device interconnectivity level up to the higher application layers that undertake the load of complex functionalities and provide a number of services to end-users. We claim that in order for smart homes to exhibit a genuinely intelligent behavior, the ability to compute compositions of individual devices automatically and dynamically is paramount. To this end, we incorporate into the architecture a composition component that employs artificial intelligence domain-independent planning to generate compositions at runtime, in a constantly evolving environment. We have implemented a fully working prototype that realizes such an architecture, and have evaluated it both in terms of performance as well as from the end-user point of view. The results of the evaluation show that the service-oriented architectural design and the support for dynamic compositions is quite efficient from the technical point of view, and that the system succeeds in satisfying the expectations and objectives of the users.

Abstract. Interaction with web services enabled marketplaces would be greatly facilitated if users were given a high level service request language to express their goals in complex business domains. This could be achieved by using a planning framework which monitors the execution of planned goals against predefined standard business processes and interacts with the user to achieve goal satisfaction. We present a planning architecture that accepts high level requests, expressed in XSRL (Xml Service Request Language). The planning framework is based on the principle of interleaving planning and execution. This is accomplished on the basis of refinement and revision as new service-related information is gathered from UDDI and web services instances, and as execution circumstances necessitate change. The system interacts with the user whenever confirmation or verification is needed.

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Business processes that span organizational borders describe the interaction between multiple parties working towards a common objective. They also express business rules that govern the behavior of the process and account for expressing changes reflecting new business objectives and new market situations.In our previous work we developed a service request language and support framework that allow users to formulate their requests against standard business processes. In this paper we extend this approach by presenting a framework capable of automatically associating business rules with relevant processes involved in a user request. This framework plans and monitors the execution of the request against services underlying these processes. Definitions and classifications of business rules (named assertions in the paper) are given together with an assertion language for expressing them. The framework is able to handle the non-determinism typical for service-oriented computing environments and it is based on the interleaving of planning and execution.