An aspect-oriented model-driven approach for building adaptable context-aware service-based applications

Context: Context-aware service-based applications development has been considered among the most studied research fields in the last decade. The objective was to accompany the rapid technology evolution of mobile computing devices by providing customized services able to interact with different contextual situations of a pervasive environment. For this purpose, many research works have advocated Model-Driven Development (MDD) for building context-aware service-based applications. However, the proposed approaches have presented specific methodologies without using development standards, which may be followed by developers. In addition, most of them have ignored the dynamic adaptation aspect at runtime that should characterize such kind of applications and no adaptation strategy was considered in their proposals. Objective: The current paper aims to propose a generic model-driven approach for context aware service-based applications engineering with a software development methodology including a reconfiguration loop to achieve the dynamic adaptation of these applications. Method: This approach focuses on the combination of MDD and Aspect Oriented Modelling (AOM) to take advantage of their benefits. AOM encapsulates different context-awareness logics separately in aspect models called ContextAspect that can be easily woven into the service's business logic according to the changing context over time. The proposed development methodology includes four phases (modelling, composition, transformation and adaptation) which act in conformance with the MDA technology. Results: The main results gained by using the present approach are the possibility to combine the MDA technology with the aspect-oriented paradigm in a generic development methodology for context-aware.service-based applications, and the handling of their dynamic adaptation at execution time according to the changes in the context. Conclusion: The development of context-aware applications is a complex, cumbersome, and time-consuming task. However, the experience reached by implementing the proposed methodology leads us to believe that the involvement of MDD and AOM is significantly beneficial to overcome some recognised shortcomings of several existing approaches and to make this task simpler, easier and faster. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.