Managing Variability of Ambient Intelligence Middleware

AmI technologies have to produce software embedded in a wide variety of everyday objects and devices with critical resource limitations. Furthermore, they must provide support to different types of applications and to many different kinds of users. The application of a Software Product Line approach would be very useful to express the different requirements of either devices or applications in terms of commonalities and variabilities when defining a family of AmI middleware platforms. A feature model for the AmI domain will help to specify and automatically derive different configurations of middleware tailored according to a large number of constraints. 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.