Model driven development of context aware software systems

With the aim to provide a contribute toward a major comprehension of the context awareness issues in software engineering in this thesis we present a modeling framework that can be used by engineers to model systems’ context aware characteristics independently of the possible implementation they could have. To this end we have appositely defined proper domain specific modeling and programming languages, respectively named CAMEL (Context Aware ModEling Language) and JCOOL (Java COntext Oriented Language), which allow the designer to be focused on the information related to the entities involved into the realization of a context aware behaviour making easy to share his/her understanding of such concern with other designers or developers. Moreover our modeling approach is based on aspect oriented modeling techniques so that it is possible to model context aware behaviours for already existing systems without having to modify their original models but only referring to their elements. Models based on this framework can be therefore object of transformation processes aimed at producing usefull artifacts such as: metrics or other measurments giving the designer feedbacks about his/her desigin choices; documentation which can be shared with the system’s stakeholders; code which actually implements them.

In questa tesi viene descritto il lavoro svolto nella realizzazione di un framework model driven per la progettazione e lo sviluppo di sistemi software context aware ovvero capaci di adattare il proprio comportamento in funzione delle informazioni afferenti ad un "contesto" percepito. Il framework si basa su due linguaggi di modellazione e programmazione "domain specific", CAMEL (Context Aware ModEling Language) e JCOOL (Java COntext Oriented Language), appositamente definiti e per i quali sono stati sviluppati editor ed interpreti. L'obiettivo è quello di poter fornire al progettista strumenti che permettano di meglio gestire la progettazione di comportamenti dipendenti dal contesto anche rispetto a sistemi già esistenti.