Pervasive Systems Development: A Stepwise Rule-centric Rigorous Service-Oriented Architectural Approach

Abstract

To stay competitive in today’s high market volatility and globalization, cross-organizational business information systems and processes are deemed to be knowledge-intensive (e.g. rulecentric), highly adaptive and context-aware, that is explicitly responding to their surrounding environment, user’s preferences and sensing devices. Towards achieving these objectives in developing such applications, we put forwards in this paper a stepwise service-oriented approach that exhibits an explicit separation of concerns, that is, we first conceptualize the mandatory functionalities and then separately and explicitly consider the added-values of contextual concerns, which we then integrate at both the fine-grained activity-level and the coarse-grained process-level to reflect their intuitive business semantics. Secondly, the proposed approach is based on business rule-centric architectural techniques, with emphasis on Event-Conditions-Actions (ECA)-driven transient tailored and adaptive architectural connectors. As third benefit, for formal underpinnings towards rapid-prototyping and validation, we semantically interpret the approach into rewriting logic and its true-concurrent and reflective operational semantics governed by the intrinsic practical Maude language.