Case Study: Context-Aware Supervision of a Smart Maintenance Process

The “smartness” of applications is heavily based on their ability to use context information for behaving in a way that perfectly matches the situation in which the application is being used and running. However, achieving situation-based behavior is not straightforward; the situation has to be identified; the functionality that provides the best fit (not always the optimal one) has to be selected from a set of options; and the smart environment has to be configured so that the primary goal can be achieved. This paper introduces a solution for context monitoring and context sharing among software agents. The concept has been implemented as part of the maintenance process of a smart building. It is still a challenge to achieve a context that can dynamically update and expand itself.