Software Configuration Mangement for ambient intelligence: the COMANCHE approach

Ambient intelligence implies that a collection of everyday devices incorporates inside computing and networking capabilities that enable them to interact with each other, make intelligent decision and interact with users through user friendly multimodal interfaces. Ambient intelligence is driven by users’ needs and their design should be driven by users’ requirements. An example of an application exhibiting ambient intelligence technologies is home automation. The consequence of putting computing capabilities in everyday devices is the development of some software to install and run on them. The presence of software requires certain procedures for managing its versions and configurations. The COMANCHE project aims to design and develop a software configuration management infrastructure which can be used in the home automation domain. In such an environment, certain issues should be considered before installing new software versions on a given device, such as the user profile, existing devices, how the new one should interact with them, etc. This paper describes these issues together with trends in ambient intelligence, and finally presents the COMANCHE project objectives and preliminary architecture. Keywords— Ambient Intelligence, Software configuration management, pervasive computing, semantic modeling, home