UML profile for the design of a platform-independent context-aware applications

Abstract

Context-aware systems offer entirely new opportunities for application developers and for end users by gathering context information and adapting systems behavior accordingly. Several context models have been defined and various context-aware middleware has been developed in order to simplify the development of context-aware applications. Unfortunately, the development of an application by using these middleware products introduces several technical details in the application. These technical details are specific to a given middleware and reduce the possibility to reuse the application on other middleware. Our goal is to propose an MDD (Model Driven Development) approach that makes it possible to design context-aware applications independently from the platform. For this purpose, we propose a UML profile that allows context-aware application designers to specify the contexts that impact an application and the variability of an application model according to this context independently from the platform.