New developments and decreasing costs of electronic appliances enable the realization of pervasive systems in our daily environment. In our work, we focus on eHome systems. The cost-intensive repetitive development process for every new eHome environment is one of the major problems preventing their widespread use. So, we transformed the repetitive development process to a single one, followed by a repetitive configuration process. To support this configuration process, we introduce a model capable of storing all the parameters relevant for this specific process. To enable semiautomatic configuration based on the model, a specification is required beforehand. In this paper, we will show how the necessary specification is covered by the introduced model, and how the model supports the eHome system configuration and context inferring at runtime.
One of the main reasons preventing a wide application of eHome systems in practice is the effort needed to combine all appliances, necessary controller and infrastructure components to benefit from derived value-added services. The properties, dependencies, locations, and installation conditions have to be properly specified for this composition and its deployment. Due to the great variance in services and eHome configurations there is a need for tool support for eHome systems. In this paper we address the software development issues of such tools. In our approach we base the software development on graph rewriting language techniques. Based on our experience, we consider this approach as a possibility to improve the productivity of the eHome system tool development. With the aid of Fujaba, we created a model capable of specifying functions, devices, environments, and value-added services. Furthermore, we used Fujaba to create the activities as graph rewriting rules for model modifications. To apply the model and to carry out the actual specification for a particular eHome and particular appliances we generated the eHomeSpecificator tool from the model and its activities. This tool can serve as a base for a wider range of tools supporting eHome systems.
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