An Engineering Approach to Adaptation and Calibration.

A new computing era after Mainframes, PC's and mobiles is becoming closer to reality since the beginning of the 21st century. This new era is often described with different terms such as pervasive, ubiquitous, ambient or context-aware computing. However, there is a common characteristic behind all these projections: They are all based on a substantially more flexible system understanding, whereby the thought of the system as a tool moves into the background and the needs and desires of the user step into the foreground. Such concepts for software applications being aware of their context are in fact not new, but become more and more important for productive fields of software and systems engineering and particularly in ubiquitous and wearable computing. In this paper we describe a generic mechanism for designing context awareness and adaptation behavior with formal methods, thus basically allowing an engineering approach in designing and implementing complex context aware adaptive systems while avoiding their usual pitfalls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]