Ph.D. Preliminary Exam - Jose M. Reyes Alamo

Date: 02 Dec, 2008
Time: 10:00 AM
Location: 223 Atanasoff Hall
Topic: Smart Home Research
Major Professor(s): Johnn Wong and Carl K. Chang


Abstract:

The smart home is a house equipped with technology like sensors and actuators with the purpose to help the resident in performing their activities of daily living (ADL). Smart home research has focused on using these homes to help the elderly and person with special needs to stay home longer and live more independently instead of moving to a nursing home. Smart homes are one of the many applications of what a pervasive computing space is. Pervasive computing has relied on the Service Oriented Computing (SOC) approach to simplify its design, reduce the development time and the cost. Different Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) have been developed within the SOC approach. Two widely accepted and used SOA are Web Services and OSGi Services. Both architectures are platform independent, rely on well-defined standards and can be deployed over networks. Web Services have become very popular and most research in SOC has been directed to developing applications using Web Services. OSGi has recently become a widely used standard in applications using embedded devices, in health care and smart homes.

Combining and composing these heterogeneous SOAs are not trivial tasks. Ensuring correctness and avoiding common programming errors by using formal method techniques are usually not enforced. How a system embedded in a smart home will operate under a constrained environment, with limited resources like power limitation and network bandwidth, has not been thoroughly studied. This work proposes to answer some of these exciting but challenging questions. Coming with a framework to integrate the Web Services and OSGi Services, use existing techniques from one SOA with the other. Furthermore, we also explore techniques to use formal methods to ensure correctness of the composed heterogeneous types of services and deploying these composed services into a resource constrained environment are research topics that we will investigate in this work.