Context-Aware Service Orchestration in Smart Environments

Abstract

With rapid technological advancements, smart systems have become an integral part of human environments. Capabilities of such systems are evolving constantly, resulting in broad areas of specific applications, ranging from personal to business and industrial use cases. This has encouraged the development of complex heterogeneous service ecosystems able to perform a wide variety of specific functionalities deployed on diverse physical nodes. Consequently, it has become a greater challenge to both maintain optimal resource utilization and achieve reliable management and orchestration of available services. For this purpose, we propose an agent-based system capable of orchestrating services on system nodes based on current context. This enables simplification of large-scale systems by introducing a generic set of services available to all nodes in the system, while service activation depends on environment state. The proposed solution provides flexibility in versatile environments typically encountered in domains such as smart homes and buildings, smart cities, and Industry 4.0. Additionally, it enables reduced consumption of resources on a given physical node. The described system is evaluated using a case study in the smart building environment, where it is shown how the proposed model can simplify the system and reduce resource utilization.