CAMPUS: A middleware for automated context-aware adaptation decision making at run time

At present, in most context-aware systems, decisions on when and how to adapt an application are made a priori by developers during the compile time. While such approaches empower developers with sufficient flexibility to specify what they want in terms of adaptation rules, they inevitably place an immense load on developers, especially in an extremely dynamic environment, to anticipate and formulate all potential run-time situations during development time. These challenges motivated us to explore an approach to automating context-aware adaptation decisions by a middleware layer at run time. The resulting middleware, CAMPUS, exploits technologies from semantic computing to dynamically derive adaptation decisions according to run-time contextual information. The CAMPUS implementation has been evaluated with a number of case applications to validate the operation of the system in a realistic environment and to provide us with an opportunity to obtain experimental results for further analysis. The results are significant in that they show that CAMPUS can effectively free developers from the need to predict, formulate, and maintain adaptation rules, thereby greatly reducing the efforts required to develop context-aware applications.