Addressing the evolution of automated user behaviour patterns by runtime model interpretation

Abstract

The use of high-level abstraction models not only can facilitate and improve system development but also runtime system evolution. This is the idea of this work, in which behavioural models created at design time are also used at runtime to evolve system behaviour.These behavioural models describe the routine tasks that users want to be automated by the system. However, users' needs may change after system deployment, and the routine tasks automated by the system must evolve to adapt to these changes. To facilitate this evolution, the automation of the specified routine tasks is achieved by directly interpreting the models at runtime. This turns models into the primary means to understand and interact with the system behaviour associated to the routine tasks as well as to execute and modify it. Thus, we provide tools to allow the adaptation of this behaviour by modifying the models at runtime. This means that the system behaviour evolution is performed by using high-level abstractions and avoiding the costs and risks associated to shutting down and restarting the system.

A model-based simulator for smart homes: Enabling reproducibility and standardization

“…As a consequence, human processes in smart spaces may require specific formalisms. In particular, authors in [45,46] introduce a specific BPM formalisms, extending the Hierarchical Task Analysis -HTA meta-model [4], that we will denote as context-adaptive behavior pattern modeling formalism or simply behavior pattern modeling formalism in the rest of paper, to deal with human processes in smart homes. Figure 1 shows an example of a behavior pattern taken from [45].…”

“…For example, the symbol A|||B denotes concurrent execution of tasks A and B, the symbol A B denotes that task B is performed immediately after the end of task A, and the symbol A[] B, in addition, that the task A produces an output used by the task B. In this paper, we have chosen the behavior pattern modeling formalism introduced in [45,46] as a mean to define human routines to be simulated. This formalism extends HTA models with:…”

“…As discussed, the main event construct in the original framework only allows to model activities that are unconstrained flows of events [31]. For this reason, we extended the simulator to support behaviour patterns for describing and modeling more complex activities as shown in [45,46].…”

“…Authors in the field of smart spaces sometimes use as synonyms a variety of terms to refer to the state of the environment and the tasks humans perform in it. To avoid misunderstandings, we use the following terminology as introduced in [38,46]:…”

Personalized adaptation in pervasive systems via non-functional requirements

“…Earlier studies have examined the completeness and correctness of the implementation, as well as its scalability and performance in real-world pervasive environments (Serral et al, 2013b,a). Also, the advantage of the model-driven approach in comparison to traditional development methods has been studied in (Serral et al, 2013a). The novelty of this work consists in supporting adaptation to NFR.…”