Middleware Support for Stable Self-Adaptation in Ubiquitous Environments


Supervision


Host

ADAM Research Group
INRIA Lille - Nord Europe
Parc Scientifique de la Haute Borne
40, avenue Halley - Bat. A, Park Plaza
59650 Villeneuve d'Ascq - FRANCE

Context

INRIA, the national institute for research in computer science and control, is dedicated to fundamental and applied research in information and communication science and technology (ICST). Throughout its eight research centres located in seven major regions (Aquitaine, Bretagne, Lorraine, Île-de-France, Nord Pas-de-Calais, Provence Alpes Côte d’Azur, Rhône-Alpes), the Institute has a workforce of 3,700, 2,900 of whom are scientists from INRIA and its partner organizations. INRIA has an annual budget of 162 million euros, 20% of which comes from its own research contracts and development products. INRIA develops many partnerships with industry and fosters technology transfer and company foundations in the field of ICST - some eighty companies have been funded. Startups are financed in particular by INRIA Transfert, a subsidiary of INRIA that supports four startup funds. The international collaborations are based on an incentive strategy of welcoming and recruiting foreign students as well as developing strong exchanges between research scientists. Priority is given to geographic zones with strong growth: Europe, Asia and North America while maintaining reasonable cooperation with South America, Africa and Middle-East.

ADAM is a project-team of the INRIA Lille Nord Europe research center. Members of the ADAM project-team are also part of the LIFL (Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale de Lille) which is a joint unit between CNRS and the University of Lille 1. The objective of the ADAM (Adaptive Distributed Applications and Middleware) project-team is to provide a set of concepts, paradigms, approaches, frameworks, and tools based on advanced software engineering techniques such as CBSE (Component-Based Software Engineering), AOSD (Aspect-Oriented Software Development) or CAC (Context-Aware Computing) to build distributed adaptive software systems (applications and middleware) involving in multi-scale environments and to take into account the adaptation all along the software life-cycle. The ADAM project-team proposes solutions to manage the evolution of application requirements in terms of functional and extra-functional properties either at the level of execution platforms or at the design level. The ADAM project-team applies them to component-based and service-oriented computing distributed applications and platforms.


Project

Ubiquitous applications are characterized by variations in their execution context. Their correct operation requires some continual adaptations based on the observation of this context. The design and implementation of these observation policies is thus the cornerstone of any ubiquitous application. COSMOS (Context Entities Composition and Sharing) is a component-based framework for managing context information in ubiquitous context-aware applications. It supports the design and development of such applications, which react to changes in their execution environment. Examples of such context changes are the appearance or disappearance of hardware or software resources, and modifications in user preferences. Because the context information that such applications require is very diverse, COSMOS relies on component-based software engineering principles to ensure the integration of context information [1]. In particular, the framework combines the concepts of software components and architectural design patterns to define its architecture’s foundations. Software components efficiently encapsulate the context information diversity, and architectural design patterns outline the context management policies [2].

Nevertheless, the exploitation of context information in ubiquitous environments remains a sensitive task since the execution context keeps evolving. In particular, existing approaches to self-adaptation systematically trigger reconfigurations whenever the surrounding context changes, thus leading to a continuous instability of the system. Although some state-of-the-art middleware approaches define context regions to reduce this side-effect [3], context regions provide strict partitions of the context space, thus solving partially the problem. Therefore, we believe that, in order to resolve this limitation, mechanisms for the detection and the processing (incl. filtering) of context information should be developed.


Objectives

The objectives of the thesis are threefold:

  1. to provide a survey and a taxonomy of existing decision stabilization approaches and mechanisms. This study will be based on an exploration of the state of the art in the domain of context-aware self-adaptive and autonomous systems [3,4,5,6,7,8]. This document will identify the requirements for stabilizing the decision-making process;

  2. to propose a novel and modular approach for supporting the stable self-adaptation of applications evolving in a ubiquitous environment. This approach will provide a “simple but efficient” abstraction for the development of stable context-aware systems. The proposed solution will be driven by the requirements identified during the first phase of the project;

  3. to demonstrate and integrate the resulting proposition in the context of the IST FP6 MUSIC [9] and DGE FCE Cappucino [10] projects. This integration will provide a concrete validation of the proposed solution and its illustration on the scenario(s) developed by these projects.

References

  1. Software Architecture Patterns for a Context-Processing Middleware Framework. R. Rouvoy, D. Conan, L. Seinturier. In IEEE Distributed Systems Online (DSO), vol. 9, no. 6. June 2008.
  2. Scalable Processing of Context Information with COSMOS. D. Conan, R. Rouvoy and L. Seinturier. In 7th IFIP International Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems (DAIS'07). p. 210–224 of LNCS 4531 (Springer). Paphos, Cyprus. June 5–8, 2007.
  3. Quality Objects (QuO). http://quo.bbn.com
  4. The Role of Probabilistic Schemes in Multisensor Context-Awareness. W. Dargie. In Proc. of the 5th IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communication workshops (PerCom'07), IEEE, March 2007.
  5. Context Fusion through Imprecise Reasoning. O.Sekkas, C.Anagnostopoulos, S.Hadjiefthymiades. In Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Services (ICPS'07). Istanbul, Turkey, July 2007.
  6. Sensor Data Fusion for Context-Aware Computing Using Dempster-Shafer Theory. H. Wu. PhD Thesis dissertation. Carnegie Mellon University. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. December 2003.
  7. Failure, connectivity and disconnection detectors. L. Temal and D. Conan. In Proc. of the 1st French-speaking conference on Mobility and ubiquity computing. Nice, France. June 1–3, 2004.
  8. Theory of Adaptation. IST MADAM project. Deliverable 2.2. December 05, 2006. http://www.intermedia.uio.no/display/madam
  9. IST FP6 MUSIC project. http://www.ist-music.eu
  10. DGE FCE Cappucino project. http://cappucino.oqube.com

Skills

Required: Eclipse, Maven, Java
Optional: Fractal, Fuzzy Logic

Funding

728 euros net / month

Extension

Depending on results and qualifications of the applicant, the above research topic can be extended in the context of a PhD thesis.