Case Study: Context-Aware Supervision of a Smart Maintenance Process

The "smartness" of applications is heavily based on their ability to use context information for behaving in a way that perfectly matches the situation in which the application is being used and running. However, achieving situation-based behavior is not straightforward, the situation has to be identified, the functionality that provides the best fit (not always the optimal one) has to be selected from a set of options, and the smart environment has to be configured so that the primary goal can be achieved. This paper introduces an advanced solution for context monitoring and context sharing among software agents, a graphical user interface for defining the scope of context for the application(s) in hand, the matchmaking of ontologies for defining the reasoning rules to be used, and a rule graph as a means of configuring an application's behavior in a way that it is aligned with the goal of the smart environment. The concept has been implemented as part of the maintenance process of a smart building. It is still a challenge to achieve a context that can dynamically update and, above all, expand itself.