Technology
The technological challenge to provide systems for senior citizens that could foster the different facets of life quality perception demand system architectures for applications and services that overcome the isolated applications of the past. In order to face the challenge to develop a system architecture that assures the interoperability of services and applications and that can be easily adopted to the requirements of each specific user as well as to the given application scenario this work package will analyse the PERSONA scenarios Multimedia Experience Sharing (MES), Daily Life Manager (DLM), Surveillance and Risk Management (SRM), and Personal Mobility Management (PMM) to identify common functional components, data work flows and communication patterns of applications and services. Here PERSONA aims to develop a self-organizing middleware resp. software infrastructure that allows the extensibility of component / device ensembles in an adhoc fashion. Thus the communication patterns of the architecture must be able to execute distributed coordination strategies in order to provide the necessary service discovery, service orchestration and service adaptation strategies (see WP 3.3). Also the middleware has to offer the necessary interfaces that guarantee the connection of applications and devices in order to integrate them into the communication patters of the architecture. To achieve this, the architectural approaches as well as the system design principles will be initially discussed – basing on the PERSONA scenarios – to produce an initial blueprint for the research activities in this project. In addition, decisions will be made about what kind of technologies can help to enhance existing middleware platforms to support the necessary self-organizing and the necessary scenario spanning features.
Consequently the aim of this work package is to provide the right means and concepts that diverse heterogeneous physical objects can be discretely embedded in the daily living environments of the elderly, which should be supported. Based on the analysis of the SoTA, the requirements from the scenarios and application domains of this work package will finally define a functional architecture for Ambient Intelligence Environments and will provide a middleware infrastructure for networking devices, services and applications.
Expected results
Expected results of this WP are the following:
- A prioritized list of proposed middleware technologies and proposed changes resp. enhancements, as a result of the study of the "off-the-shelf" solutions.
- Architectural Description of functional components.
- Analysis of at least three areas within the functional system architecture: "analysis and interpretation", "execution strategy mapping" and "sensing / manipulation of the environment".
- Identification, analysis and specification of the basic functionalities: service discovery, security and privacy, context-management etc. Also the cooperation within distributed environments will be identified and specified.
- Final Reference Architecture model for AAL.
- Creation of one middleware instance.
