Carlos Manuel Rodrigues Machado Autonomic Ubiquitous Computing

Abstract
The Ubiquitous Computing and Autonomic Computing reached a point of convergence in
which pervasive technology in the environment meets the ability of people to interact with it, making
use of all the possibilities made available by this technology. Ubiquitous computing envisions a
habitat where the abundance of devices, services and applications allows the physical and virtual
worlds to become seamlessly merged. The promise of ubiquitous computing environments is not
feasible unless these systems can effectively "disappear". In order to achieve this goal, they need to
become autonomic, by managing their own evolution and configuration with minimal user
intervention. It is in this context that aspects like self-configuration and self-healing from the
autonomic computing concept were adopted in this project.
The context awareness and the creation of applications which use that context are the core
concern of Ubiquitous Computing Systems and represent the fundamentals for autonomic actions
in this type of systems. Such research raises questions on context acquisition, distribution and
manipulation, as well as on artificial intelligence algorithms that decide autonomic actions in the
environment, having implications in the human interaction with Autonomic Ubiquitous Systems.
The research presented in this thesis concentrates on some of those issues. During this
project it was developed an experimental setup for context acquisition, in an effortless way, of some
activities of a small group of users. This experimental setup was installed in a real home where a
young family, a couple and a small child, were actually living. This experimental setup was mainly
responsible for the control of the light system of the house, by a network of several inter-connected
devices scattered in the home with limited resources. This prototype installation allowed the
validation of the system ability, to capture daily life behaviour patterns of the inhabitants.
The system architecture was designed based on the concept of a high level and a low level
autonomic management system taking from nature the model of the human reflex arc. A reflexive
behaviour is managed at a local level by the small devices, with limited resources, high level
management is responsible for processing and analysis of the events broadcast by the group of
small devices, and run in a centralized mode in a PC.
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