Variability in Ambient Intelligence: A Family of Middleware Solution

The development of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) software applications implies dealing with a wide variety of devices, which runs in different environments. These applications also target a wide range of end-users, with different needs and requirements. Software Product Lines are a relatively modern software paradigm whose main goal is to offer techniques and mechanisms to the systematic development of applications belonging to a domain with a high degree of variability. Therefore, the application of a Software Product Line for the construction of a family of middleware platforms for AmI applications should help to deal with the variability inherent to this domain. The first step when constructing a Software Product Line (SPL) is to create some sort of model which specifies the variability of the domain the SPL targets. This model is then used as basis for configuring and automatically creating specific products. The aim of this article is to highlight the complexity of managing different types of variability during the development of applications for AmI environments. A generic process for automatically generating a custom configuration of a middleware variant is also presented.