Engineering Task-Automation Systems for Domain Specificity

Domain specificity is largely recognized as a means to foster the adoption of systems by specific communities of non-technical users. This paper presents an architecture for the development of Task-Automation Systems that can be customized in specific domains. It is one of the results of a human-centred design process we performed to support non-technical people to program the behaviour of smart objects by defining event-condition-action (ECA) rules. We illustrate the main modules of the proposed architecture, also describing how it supports the creation of ECA rules constrained by means of temporal and spatial conditions. Finally, we report on the development of a Task-Automation System customized by developing and comparing three different composition paradigms