Interoperable Pervasive Systems

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Pervasive computing envisions environments where computers are blended into everyday objects in order to provide value-added services to people. This vision is set to become reality and is actually raising huge expectations from consumers and service providers alike. As a result, many smart devices and open platforms are now proposed and installed in our homes and workplaces.Unfortunately, because of a lack of standards as well as a lack of cooperation between providers, the deployment of innovative services in our living places is today rather anarchic. This results in highly heterogeneous and sometimes incoherent installations, leading to major issues in terms of service efficiency, software maintenance, and even aesthetics.The purpose of this project is therefore to define and develop architectures, models and algorithms enabling interoperability in pervasive environments. In this approach, an application developed on a given platform could use services provided by another platform. This goal is very challenging. Amongst other things, it requires platforms to build and maintain knowledge about themselves, about the environment, and about the capabilities of other platforms. It also demands abilities to conduct interactions with others in order to build shared contextual information and to find out if remote services can be actually used. Finally, it calls for a development framework including these facilities and facilitating programming activities.Finally, it is to be noted that interoperability features must be achieved in an autonomic way. A major constraint in pervasive environments is that there is usually no local administrator. Most management operations must be undergone by the system itself.The project will be based on two major open platforms, PCOM from the University of Mannheim and iPojo/iCasa from Grenoble University. These two successful platforms, heavily used and cited in academia and industry, already present advanced features required to conduct this project. They are dynamic, autonomic and able to integrate heterogeneous devices and applications. More research effort is however necessary to reach interoperability as envisioned in this project. Besides a literature review on interaction in Pervasive Computing, PCOM and iPojo will be used as concrete platforms for our research. We will explore interaction protocols and context models that enable interoperability in Pervasive Computing and implement these in an architecture bridging PCOM and iPojo/iCasa.The relevance of the project outputs will be assessed on applications pertaining to the health domain. Providing services enhancing the potential of the elderly and patients to live and cope at home is today a major challenge, both in economical and societal terms. Healthcare costs are booming and the aging of the population only reinforces this trend. In this context, advances in interoperable pervasive computing are very encouraging and exciting.