ECA-Rule Visual Programming for Ubiquitous and Nomadic Computing

System modeling, analysis and visualization are becoming a common practice for the design of distributed intelligent systems since the wide adoption of the Unified Modeling Language (UML). However, UML cannot describe important behavioral properties such as context awareness as required for ubiquitous computing. In this paper, we present Context Aware UML Sequence diagrams (CA UML-S), an experimental visual programming language that extends UML sequence diagrams with data/ object spaces to represent computational context awareness.Theprogramming language provides the means to describe the event-condition-action (ECA) rules that govern complex nomadic user behavior and to visualize their effect.TheECArules are compiled into common concurrent programming abstractions by introducing structuring notions of object creation, synchronization, and communication, along with sequential and selective composition of simpler rules. The contribution of this work is in providing programming abstractions that facilitate the design of context-aware applications for ubiquitous and nomadic computing.