Methodology and Tools for Pervasive Application Development

Abstract

Understanding the user's demands and intentions is essential when developing pervasive applications. It ensures proactive decisions and improves usability. However, due to a lack of conceptual development methodology and supporting tools, it is difficult to orient the designs towards user's needs. To make the developer's task feasible, we present a development environment, called PerDE, which supports a novel design method. Our approach combines the notion of the situation with an application model and provides a domain-specific design language and a set of graphical toolkits covering the development life cycle of a pervasive application. We validate our approach on developing a realistic situation and describe the results from a user study that illustrates the expressiveness and usability of PerDE.

Engineering context-aware systems and applications: A survey

“…PerDe [188]: Is a development environment that orients the designs of Pervasive Computing applications towards the user's needs. It provides a domain-specific design language and a set of graphical tool-kits covering some development life-cycle stages for this kind of applications.…”

“…No methodology enables the requirement elicitation with a tool, and only DiaSuite [127] allows the maintenance with one. MIRIE [115] offers a strong formal verification support, while MUSIC [32], PerDe [188] and DiaSuite [127] offer verification based on simulation. It has to be acknowledged that DiaSuite [127] is one of the most complete methodologies, regarding to these factors and within the scope of this survey.…”

Application of Software Engineering techniques to improve the reliability of Intelligent Environments

“…Although a series of methodologies have been recently proposed to improve the development and the reliability of IE [5] and related systems, such as Pervasive/Ubiquitous Computing [6][7][8], Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) [9], Multi-Agent [10], and Sense/Compute/Control [11] ones, each of them is generally focused on solving certain development issues and are disconnected from each other [3]. Accordingly, more effort and work is necessary to provide standardized and unified methodologies, techniques and tools that can be collectively adopted by the community involved in the development of these systems.…”

Increasing user confidence in intelligent environments

“…So far, some methodologies have been specifically proposed to improve the reliability of IE [10][11][12]. Likewise, other methodologies initially proposed for the development of reliable Pervasive/Ubiquitous Computing [13][14][15], Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) [16,17], and Multi-Agent [18] Systems could be applied to the development of IE. However, these proposals still face two main challenges, yet to be solved: (1) such methodologies are usually intended to be applied only in some of the development stages; (2) there is a lack of integration between them [4].…”