Interoperable Pervasive Systems

普适计算设想了一种环境，在这种环境中，计算机被融入到日常物品中，以便为人们提供增值服务。这一愿景将成为现实，并实际上提高了消费者和服务提供商的巨大期望。因此，许多智能设备和开放平台现在被提出并安装在我们的家庭和工作场所。不幸的是，由于缺乏标准以及提供商之间缺乏合作，今天我们生活场所的创新服务部署相当无政府状态。这导致了高度异构性的安装，有时甚至是不连贯的安装，导致在服务效率、软件维护甚至美观方面的重大问题。因此，该项目的目的是定义和开发能够在普适环境中实现互操作性的体系结构、模型和算法。在这种方法中，在给定平台上开发的应用程序可以使用另一个平台提供的服务。这个目标非常具有挑战性。除其他事项外，它还要求平台构建和维护有关自身、环境和其他平台功能的知识。它还需要能够与其他人进行交互，以构建共享的上下文信息，并确定是否可以实际使用远程服务。最后，它需要一个包括这些设施和促进编程活动的开发框架。最后，需要注意的是，互操作功能必须以自主的方式实现。普及环境中的一个主要限制是通常没有本地管理员。大多数管理操作必须由系统本身完成。该项目将基于两个主要的开放平台：曼海姆大学的PCOM和格勒诺布尔大学的iPOJO/ICASA。这两个成功的平台在学术界和工业界得到了广泛的使用和引用，已经提供了实施该项目所需的高级功能。它们是动态的、自主的，能够集成不同的设备和应用程序。然而，要达到本项目设想的互操作性，还需要进行更多的研究工作。除了关于普适计算中交互的文献综述外，PCOM和iPOJO将被用作我们研究的具体平台。我们将探索在普适计算中实现互操作性的交互协议和上下文模型，并在连接PCOM和iPOJO/iCases的体系结构中实现这些协议和上下文模型。项目输出的相关性将在与健康领域相关的应用程序上进行评估。提供提高老年人和病人在家中生活和应付能力的潜力的服务，在经济和社会方面都是今天的一个重大挑战。医疗成本正在飙升，而人口老龄化只会加强这一趋势。在这种背景下，可互操作普适计算的进步是非常令人鼓舞和令人兴奋的。

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.