Article Preview
TopIntroduction
Mobile applications deployment has grown tremendously in recent years. There are now many smart mobile applications available in different smart domains such as Industry 4.0, smart cities, smart health and smart home (Yin et al., 2015; Lu, 2017; Badinelli, & Sarno, 2017; Woetzel et al. 2018). These applications are built with advanced communication technologies (Wi-Fi, 4G, etc.) linked with connected objects. This makes a mobile application more suitable to fulfill various user’s needs. The availability of many different and heterogeneous interconnected objects introduces more challenges as the application complexity and its maintainability costs are high. Moreover, existing mobile applications have mostly neglected the context of the user, usage contexts and their preferences that evolve faster. The context-aware mobile application, as a new domain of research, plays a vital role in managing huge context data. It is used to identify instantly user’s situations for deploying suitable action services. As stated in (Bouneffouf, Bouzeghoub, & Ganarski, 2013) situations are semantic interpretations of low-level context, allowing a higher-level user’s behavior specification in environments within the corresponding actions services. However, situations give the semantic meaning and intelligence into the application to define and maintain it easily, better than using basic contextual information. In addition, the composition of situations is also useful for mobile context-aware application to support other user-specified functionalities such as recommending a prior user’s experiences according to specific user’s profile, current needs, and his preferences. Therefore, building mobile context-aware composite situations-based application is becoming the most challenging task in order to identify and manage a large number of user’s situations from scratch (using programming language) for realizing mobile application architecture.
Despite the increasing adoption of mobile and context-aware applications, exploiting of semantic technologies and smart services with innovative intelligent strategies is not achieved automatically nor well structural manner. Furthermore, the application’s flexibility remains limited to add/remove/update any business functionality, interactions modality in the right place at the right time. Mobile context-aware applications follow numerous technological transformations, becoming even more personalized and situation-driven. They bring into design more advanced applications having a good level of reusability and flexibility while allowing mobile application designers to reason on composite situations computed from both various user pre-defined conditions and specific situations. With the new composition operators (i.e. parallel, sequence, negation, and recurrence) among existing atomic situations and various distributed smart services, users have gained better control over the process of managing usage constraints applications, smart objects long-life and its evolving context, making it reusable and achieving its durability. We need a distributed, agile management and dynamic generation process application on the fly to increase flexibility by factorization of several identified shared situations and events to different users at the same time. The composite situations are expressed through numerous atomic situations and conditions at design time, thus meaning that other actions are triggerable. Furthermore, in order to take into account a large number of situations, the designer can add and configure easily new rules.