Context-Aware Service Modeling and Conflicts Discovery Based on Petri Net

In smart environments, context-aware service sense various kinds of context information and reacts automatically to adapt to changing circumstances. These adaptions may lead to context changes which trigger other services elsewhere in the environment and thus produce cascading reactions. Conflict adaptions or unexpected side effects may exist in this process. This article focuses on service conflicts related to frustrations in service execution and violations of the service's objective. A petri net-based approach is proposed to model and simulate context changes as well as services execution, and a conflicts discovery mechanism was built to detect potential conflicts. The case study of smart home scenarios shows how the method helps locate conflicts caused by different services, validating the effectiveness of the proposed approach.