Reasoning in Context-Aware Systems with Modal Logics

Abstract

Context-aware systems are ubiquitous computing systems capable to adapt their behavior according to a dynamical changing environment. The development of reasoning and modeling techniques of context information have resulted a challenging task due to the inherent complexity of dynamical systems. In particular, modeling time and location context information have been so far constrained in current formalisms for context-aware computing due to expressive and computational limitations. Due to the well-known balance of expressive power and efficient reasoning algorithms associated to modal logics, we propose in the current work the use of expressive modal logics as a reasoning framework for context-aware pervasive systems. In particular, we describe a consistency model for a context-aware communication system. The consistency of this model is characterized in term of the satisfiability of the µ-calculus (an expressive modal logic).