Piecemeal development of intelligent applications for smart spaces

Software development is facing new challenges as a result of evolution towards integration and collaboration-based service engineering, which embody high degrees of dynamism both at design time and run-time. Short times-to-market require cost reduction by maximizing software reuse. Openness for new innovations presumes a flexible development platform and fast software engineering practices. User satisfaction assumes situation-based applications of high quality. The main contribution of this paper is the Piecemeal Service Engineering (PSE) approach developed for and tested in application development for smart spaces. The intent of PSE is to maximize the reuse of existing knowledge of business and design practices and existing technical assets in the development of new smart-space applications. Business knowledge is mostly informal and domain-dependent, but architectural knowledge is generic, at least semi-formal, and represented in principles, ontologies, patterns, and rules that together form a reusable architectural knowledge base for fast smart-space application development. PSE facilitates the incremental development of intelligent applications by supporting abstraction, aggregation and adaptability in smart-space development.