Intelligible software delivery in smart environments supported by a macro and micro context awareness model

Smart environments help to increase the autonomy and quality of life of people with special needs (PwSN) through adapted assistive services. In conjunction with context awareness and service delivery mechanisms, it is possible to dynamically deliver services to users by taking into account contextual information, e.g., user’s locations, devices’ states, current activities. However, implementing such systems in actual smart spaces is not trivial. The micro and macro context awareness model helps in defining layers on which contextual information are processed as close as possible from their sources (micro), without losing the benefits of information processing at a systemic level (macro). This paper describes the micro and macro context awareness model and its uses in the implementation of a service provision system for smart environments. Transparency and intelligibility are important factors in context awareness system, which help developers to fully understand the full behavior of the systems and help users to learn how the systems work. We therefore accompanied our micro and macro model with an intelligibility model which allow the generation of explanations describing the system’s behaviors according to the processed context. Finally, results coming from the evaluations of the micro/macro model and comparison with related works are presented.