An autonomic context management system for pervasive computing

Context-aware applications adapt to changing computing environments or changing user circumstances/tasks. Context information that supports such adaptations is provided by the underlying infrastructure, which gathers, pre-processes and provisions context information from a variety of context information sources. Such an infrastructure is prone to failures and disconnections that negatively impact on the ability of context-aware applications to adapt (and therefore dramatically impact on their usability). This paper describes a model-based autonomic context management system (ACoMS) that can dynamically configure and reconfigure its context information gathering and pre-processing functionality in order to provide fault tolerant provisioning of context information. The approach uses standards based descriptions of context information sources to increase openness, interoperability and scalability of context-aware systems