A Model-Driven Approach for the Development of Middleware Technologies for Ubiquitous Systems

Communication technologies are crucial in ubiquitous systems, and consequently, in AmI Systems. Developers should be able to make design decisions about these technologies in order to fulfill the requirements of each specific system. As a consequence, choosing and using specific ones (protocols, middleware, networking technologies, etc.) is actually not only a technical but a design problem that has consequences in relation with the supported applications/systems (e.g. mobile applications, context-aware systems, ambient intelligence environments, etc). However, the use of communication technologies require a high level of expertise, specially when using middleware technologies, since they usually entail a complex design. This research work intends to contribute to simplifying and improving the design, use and understanding of existing or future communication technologies. This paper proposes a model-driven approach to simplify the development of complex communication schemes. From the abstract specification of a communication scheme as a Computation Independent Model (CIM), it is derived a Platform Independent Model (PIM), which comprises the elements present in ubiquitous systems. Middleware technologies and their particular settings conform to Platform Specific Models (PSM) that stem from applying transformation rules to that PIM. To automatize the transformation process, the approach has been implemented with EMF and ATL. Finally, as a case study, the model-driven development of a middleware for ubiquitous systems is presented.