Architecture Pattern for Context-Aware Smart Environments

Abstract

Recent years marked many smart environment solutions hitting the market and applying latest pervasive computing research advancements on an industrial scale. Context-aware smart environments are able to act accordingly to the immediate environment information in an intelligent, predefined, learned, or automatically inferred way, and are able to communicate to their users, thus increasing users’ comfort and awareness level. Since the beginning of the 2000s, many projects have been designing and implementing smart environment systems. When looking post-factum at the architectures of these systems, one can notice a lot of similarities among them. With the same basic structure, the biggest differences usually arise at the level of individual components, aimed to satisfy different end-level requirements. Taking many successful and undergoing projects as case-studies, this chapter looks for the common structure, the common patterns, and the “best practices” that can help future projects to reduce the efforts spent on the general system frame, and redirect those efforts to more specific requirements that are unique in every project. It introduces several architecture layers that inevitably exist in one form or another, discusses the possible layer components and the common information flows, and mentions the most notable problems, such as scalability and fault tolerance. Several case studies of successful or undergoing smart building projects show that the presented pattern can be easily mapped to their architectures.

Designing Home Automation Routines Using an LLM-Based Chatbot

“…They encompass various applications and settings, from smart homes to smart cities and factories [17]. The development of smart environments faces challenges such as precise activity recognition, effective localization systems, and the need for a smooth transition from traditional to smart environments [18,19]. Emerging wearable devices and wireless communication technologies are expected to further optimize the resource efficiency, comfort, and safety of such environments [17].…”

IoT architectures: from data to smart systems

“…The architecture in Figure 1 is a generalization of IoT architectures actually deployed. Most of these focus on the IoT and classification aspects, see for instance (Weyrich and Ebert (2016)) for a review of industrial IoT architectures, or (Fremantle (2015)) for a specific layered proposal with cloud backends, while Degeler and Lazovik (2014) extract patterns specifically for context extraction in smart environments. In my own research, together with colleagues, I designed, realized and deployed variations of the complete architecture in Figure 1 for smart offices (Georgievski et al (2012)), for smart buildings (Georgievski et al (2017)), and proposed it as a generic blueprint for smart energy systems (Aiello et al (2021)).…”

Performance analysis of the ubiquitous and emergent properties of an autonomic reflective middleware for smart cities

“…As well, some works have proposed architectures to build applications for smart cities [9,10]. For example, [11,12] present methodologies to define a smart city, which allows measuring its level of development.…”

“…In [10] was developed a Smart System Architecture for context-aware smart environments, which is composed of four layers: users, reasoning, ubiquity and physical. The physical layer contains the hardware parts of the system.…”

“…In [10], the authors propose an architecture for context-aware smart environments composed of four layers. In our case, MiSCi is deployed as a distributed middleware, this feature allows it to deal with scalability and performance troubles.…”