ABSTRACT. Applications that rely on mobile devices for user interaction must be mindful of the

No abstract

Control systems must increasingly be designed to involve collections of hardware and software components, both of which may evolve over the lifetime of the system, and which are expected to provide self-managing, adaptive, autonomic behaviour. Understanding the behaviour such a system will exhibit under any specific conditions is a significant design challenge. We present a model derived from approaches to modelling dynamical systems in which the adaptive behaviour of an autonomic system may be described and analysed as a whole. We explain our ideas with reference to a hybrid hardware/software system, and argue that it generalises to other classes of autonomic systems.

Abstract. One of the key challenges faced when developing contextaware pervasive systems is to capture the set of inputs that we want a system to adapt to. Arbitrarily specifying ranges of sensor values to respond to will lead to incompleteness of the specification, and may also result in conflicts, when multiple incompatible adaptations may be triggered by a single user action. We posit that the ideal approach combines the use of past traces of real, annotated context data with the ability for a system designer or user to go in and interactively modify the specification of the set of inputs a particular adaptation should be responsive to. We introduce Situvis, an interactive visualisation tool we have developed which assists users and developers of context-aware pervasive systems by visually representing the conditions that need to be present for a situation to be triggered in terms of the real-world context that is being recorded, and allows the user to visually inspect these properties, evaluate their correctness, and change them as required. This tool provides the means to understand the scope of any adaptation defined in the system, and intuitively resolve conflicts inherent in the specification.

No abstract