An Overview on Real-Time Constraints for Ambient Intelligence (AmI)

AmI can be defined as a digital environment that helps proactively the daily lives of people, in which small devices are able to make autonomous decisions. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is a kind of AmI system in the welfare and health context. This kind of system has temporal attributes linked to the tasks that compose it. Therefore, clearly AmI-AAL systems can be defined as real-time systems. However, despite the importance of real-time constraints for AmI systems, to the best of our knowledge the state of the art lacks of a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of temporal constraints accomplishments for AmI domain. This article presents an overview of the proposals of AmI considering time constraints. Two objectives are defined: to understand how the current works deal with the temporal aspects of AmI applications; propose some alternative for modeling this type of system, in such a way that the timing constraints are meet.