Fujaba-Based Tool Development for eHome Systems

One of the main reasons preventing a wide application of eHome systems in practice is the effort needed to combine all appliances, necessary controller and infrastructure components to benefit from derived value-added services. The properties, dependencies, locations, and installation conditions have to be properly specified for this composition and its deployment. Due to the great variance in services and eHome configurations there is a need for tool support for eHome systems. In this paper we address the software development issues of such tools. In our approach we base the software development on graph rewriting language techniques. Based on our experience, we consider this approach as a possibility to improve the productivity of the eHome system tool development. With the aid of Fujaba, we created a model capable of specifying functions, devices, environments, and value-added services. Furthermore, we used Fujaba to create the activities as graph rewriting rules for model modifications. To apply the model and to carry out the actual specification for a particular eHome and particular appliances we generated the eHomeSpecificator tool from the model and its activities. This tool can serve as a base for a wider range of tools supporting eHome systems.