People in industrial societies carry more and more portable electronic devices (e.g., smartphone or console) with some kind of wireless connectivity support. Interaction with auto-discovered target devices present in the environment (e.g., the air conditioning of a hotel) is not so easy since devices may provide inaccessible user interfaces (e.g., in a foreign language that the user cannot understand). Scalability for multiple concurrent users and response times are still problems in this domain. In this paper, we assess an interoperable architecture, which enables interaction between people with some kind of special need and their environment. The assessment, based on performance patterns and antipatterns, tries to detect performance issues and also tries to enhance the architecture design for improving system performance. As a result of the assessment, the initial design changed substantially. We refactorized the design according to the Fast Path pattern and The Ramp antipattern. Moreover, resources were correctly allocated. Finally, the required response time was fulfilled in all system scenarios. For a specific scenario, response time was reduced from 60 seconds to less than 6 seconds.E. Gómez-Martínez Babel Group, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain e-mail: elena.gomez@fi.upm.es R. Gonz´alez Cabero Ontology Engineering Group, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain e-mail: rgonza@fi.upm.es J. Merseguer Departamento de Informa´tica e Ingenier´ıa de Sistemas, Universidad de Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain e-mail: jmerse@unizar.es
IntroductíonUniversal Access continues being a critical quality target for Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), as Stephanidis (2001) stated, especially in industrial societies where there is a growing number of people with functional diversity, including those with aging-related conditions. Indeed, ICTs may require particular skills and abilities to interact with platforms, the plethora of wireless communication systems and smart devices such as kiosks or ATMs. The inexistence of these skills and abilities extends in some cases the traditional concept of disabled people towards people with functional diversity or special needs. The growing gap between their abilities and access to ICT is called the digital divide.The INREDIS project 1 (INterfaces for RElations between Environment and people with DISabilities) aimed to develop environments that enable the creation of communications and interaction channels between people with some kind of special need and their context, where the targets are a set of auto-discoverable devices. More than 200 researchers from 14 Spanish companies and 19 research organizations collaborated to carry out this project during 48 months and a budget of e23.6 millions.Although goal of the INREDIS project was to completely develop an accessibility architecture for disabled people, here we only focus on the analysis and design steps of the project, in particular in the performance assessment carried out. The rationale for ...
