Context Design and Tracking for IoT-Based Energy Management in Smart Cities

The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its innumerous applications for Smart Cities emphasizes the need for context-aware systems able to adapt behavior automatically to instant environment conditions. Currently, there is a gap in terms of understanding how context information is interrelated, as well as tracking which events occurred under which conditions within certain context scopes. Visualizing, specifying, tracking and monitoring typical contexts involved in IoT-based applications are still challenging activities since context modeling remains a low level process that requires much human expertise. In this paper we propose a new context life cycle that involves context design and context tracking. We developed a context-aware management framework, where contexts are modeled as graphs and can be explicitly designed and their occurrences can be tracked down. We believe that this feature of designing and tracking context graphs may help developers, administrators, and end-users in harnessing the wealth of information generated by highly scalable IoT systems.