On specifying and verifying context-aware systems

Software systems often need to be adapted for different execution environments, problem sets, and available resources to maintain and ensure their efficiency and reliability, being thus context-aware. Albeit, many approaches for context-aware systems specification have been proposed in the literature, the absence or poor representation of contextual information and its relationships with system entities without affecting system complexity and consistency usually leads to low-precision and irrelevant results. Moreover, it is difficult to verify the correctness of existing context models. In this paper, we propose a formal model for context-aware adaptive systems specification. The model also supports formal verification of the obtained system model through a set of inherent invariants, where context-aware systems behaviour can be verified according to system invariants by applying model checking techniques.