A Development Framework for Adaptive Pervasive Applications

Pervasive computing applications need to cope with the dynamics of their environment: For example, applications may want to adapt when connectivity changes, new services appear, user requirements and preferences change, or some application-specific sensor value exceeds a predefined threshold. Pervasive applications are context-aware and react during runtime to changes in their environment in order to maintain their usefulness and quality of service. While context-awareness as such has been the subject of intensive studies for more than a decade, the development of adaptive applications that are able to adjust themselves to context changes still is a complex and not well understood task. Software engineering techniques are needed in order to design and implement adaptivity and variability into the application software.