Moving Towards Distributed Networks of Proactive, Self-Adaptive and Context-Aware Systems: a New Research Direction?

Instead of being static and waiting passively for instructions, software systems are required to take a more proactive approach in their behavior in order to anticipate and to adapt to the needs of their users. To design and develop such systems in an affordable, predictable and timely manner is a great software engineering challenge. Even though there have been notable steps for modeling self-adaptive and contextaware systems, there is still a lack of a generic model agreed by the research community for developing smart applications.
The goal of this study is to explore the idea of having a multiple networks of proactive context-aware adaptive systems working together for achieving common goals. To support our vision, we introduce a context-aware self-adaptive software model for mobile devices capable of learning from the user’s behavior by using Proactive Computing. The novelty comes from the possibility of developing smart applications that would benefit from the proposed properties. Moreover, we discuss a motivating scenario that lead to this work and propose a case study where a collaborative e-Learning application is implementing our model.