Adaptive and reliable binding in ambient service systems

Supported by an automated runtime management system even critical applications, like healthcare applications, can be build upon the interaction with ambient services. They are provided by mobile resource-constrained devices and subject to frequently changing environmental conditions and exceptions. The runtime management has to ensure stable bindings between interacting services and applications, thus it has to provide the monitoring and control functionality necessary for binding reconfiguration and adaption. Furthermore, due to the resource restriction of mobile devices like, for example mobile phones, such a management system must have a small footprint to be implementable on these devices. To realize a management system fulfilling these requirements, we follow the approach of model-based management which divides the overall management process in a planning phase and a runtime phase. This paper concentrates on the presentation of how bindings and their management are planned and how the binding policies governing the management are derived in the planning phase. Furthermore, it gives an overview of how these low-level binding policies are enforced in the runtime phase.