A Context-Sensitive Rule-Based Architecture for a Smart Building Environment

In a smart building environment nomadic users can benefit from specialised context-sensitive services. These can increase productivity and offer an improved lifestyle for users. The data management system-context architecture (DMS-CA) has been designed to provide these services. The DMS-CA is novel in providing a completely generic system that is both user-friendly and efficient. The system is generic in that it can be tailored by the system administrator (using XML specifications) for a particular environment of context information inputs and a set of services. In addition, the actual rules that determine which services are triggered by which combination of contextual inputs are determined by the individual user in a user-friendly manner. Thus the generic architecture can be easily deployed for a particular building and an individual user. Generic solutions are sometimes inefficient but this system has been designed to be highly efficient through using an event-based architecture and dealing with time in a special way. The DMS-CA has been deployed for a building incorporating a wireless sensor network, and shown to provide a high quality, efficient context-sensitive data delivery service.