A Situation-Oriented IoT Middleware for Resolution of Conflict Contexts Based on Combination of Priorities

Situation-aware service is recognized as an emerging research issue in ubiquitous computing. It becomes more important and significant with the recent progress in IoT (Internet of Things), since the situations considered in IoT are more complex, become global, and cause more conflict. In this paper, a middleware for management conflict situations was designed, to prompt the development of context-aware services. It is characterized by its ability of situation-oriented, paying attention to relations among users (and situations as well) and smart objects around. Eventually, following issues were solved: (a) a method for detecting (i.e., being aware of) a specific situation, and triggering corresponding service; and (b) an algorithm for conflict situations/contexts management. A diagram of situation state transition (DSST) was proposed to specify states of a situation. A set of situation-oriented ECA rules are presented to reason the situations’ states based on sensed data. Policies based on DSST for resolving conflicts were also given. The experiment results demonstrate the feasibility of proposed method, and the performance of proposed situation-oriented policies.