A Survey of Service Composition in Ambient Intelligence Environments
Artificial Intelligence Review, 40 (3):
247-270 (October 2013)DOI: 10.1007/s10462-011-9283-1
Abstract
This article presents a comparative review of systems performing service composition in Ambient Intelligence Environments. Such environments should comply to ubiquitous or pervasive computing guidelines by sensing the user needs or wishes and offering intuitive human-computer interaction and a comfortable non-intrusive experience. To achieve this goal service orientation is widely used and tightly linked with AmI systems. Some of these employ the Web Service technology, which involves well-defined web technologies and standards that facilitate interoperable machine to machine interaction. Other systems regard services of different technologies (e.g. UPnP, OSGi etc) or generally as abstractions of various actions. Service operations are sometimes implemented as software based functions or actions over hardware equipment (e.g. UPnP players). However, a single service satisfies an atomic only user need, so services need to be composed (i.e. combined), in order to provide the usually requested complex tasks. Since manual service composition is obviously a hassle for the user, ambient systems struggle to automate this process by applying various methods. The approaches that have been adopted during the last years vary widely in many aspects, like domain of application, modeling of services, composition method, knowledge representation and interfaces. This work presents a comparative view of these approaches revealing similarities and differences, while providing additional information.
