ScudContext: Large-scale Environmental Context Services Infrastructure Towards Cyber-Physical Space Integration

The development of ubiquitous computing alleviate computer users from the shackles of desktop computing,and help users focus on the task itself.As an important embodiment of ubiquitous computing,context-aware systems which are becoming a hot spot of research.In order to simplify the development of context-aware systems and effectively support the establishment of a variety of feature-rich context-aware systems,various types of context-aware middleware are emerging which generally consist of context modeling,storage,reasoning and subscribing-publishing capabilities.Cyber-Physical Systems(CPS) are a new type of context-aware systems,which represent the next generation of computing systems development.Making full use of a large number of sensing devices to capture contextual information and supplying environmental context services is the core technology of CPS.However,the existing context service infrastructure rarely considers the relationship to physical space,and they are limited with respect to system size,service delivery,scalability,etc.In this paper,taking the cyber-physical space integration systems as our application background,we examined several challenges with large-scale environmental context services infrastructures,and conducted a number of effective works,as summarized below:1) We proposed a cyber-physical space integrated environmental context model,and discussed three aspects of this model from context space management,device management and service management respectively.2) Based on the model above,we proposed a context services infrastructure towards cyber-physical space integration named ScudContext.ScudContext utilizes semantic technolog(?) spatial-tree model and SOA framework to well reflect the contextual evolution of physical space,supply large-scale environmental context services towards cyber-physical integration,and enable the advantage of loosely-coupled architecture,easy collaboration,scalability and standardized interfaces,etc.3) We implemented the ScudContext framework in C++ for the Windows platform.4) Finally,we used a simulation experiment called a sensing-building system to illustrate ScudContext's operating mechanism,and show the characteristics of the ScudContext framework.