Feature interactions in services for Internet personal appliances

Abstract

This paper investigates the feature interaction problem, known from traditional telephony environments, in the context of Internet personal appliances (IPA). IPAs are dedicated consumer devices which contain at least one network processor. They include the Internet alarm clock, which takes into account road conditions or expected arrival times of air planes when setting the alarm time, or the Internet enabled fridge, which keeps an inventory of groceries and issues orders to suppliers. The results of our investigation are threefold. The first part of this paper introduces a service taxonomy supported by a list of example services. The second part discusses feature interactions between services for appliances. A classification for such interactions and example interactions and possible conflicts are presented. The final part contains an outline for an approach to handle such interactions.