Service Configuration Management for Ambient Intelligence: The COMANCHE Approach

Ambient intelligence manifests itself through a collection of everyday devices incorporating computing and networking capabilities that enable them to interact with each other, make intelligent decisions and interact with users through user friendly multimodal interfaces. Ambient intelligence is driven by users' needs and the design of its capabilities should be driven by users' requirements. An example of an application exhibiting ambient intelligence is home automation. A consequence of embedding computing capabilities in everyday devices is the development of software to be installed and run on them. The presence of software requires certain procedures for managing its installation, versions and configurations. The COMANCHE project aims to design and develop a software configuration management infrastructure which can be used in the home automation domain. In such an environment, certain issues should be considered before installing new software versions on a given device, such as the user profile, co-existing devices and the way the new ones should interact with them, etc. This paper describes these issues together with trends in ambient intelligence, and finally presents the COMANCHE project objectives and preliminary architecture.