Goal-based composition of stateful services for smart homes

The emerging trend in process management and in service oriented applications is to enable the composition of new distributed processes on the basis of user requests, through (parts of) available (and often embedded in the environment) services to be composed and orchestrated in order to satisfy such requests. Here, we consider a user process as specified in terms of repeated goals that the user may choose to get fulfilled, organized in a kind of routine. Available services are suitably composed and orchestrated in order to realize such a process. In particular we focus on smart homes, in which available services are those ones offered by sensor and actuator devices deployed in the home, and the target user process is directly and continuously controlled by the inhabitants, through actual goal choices. We provide a solver that synthesizes the orchestrator for the requested process and we show its practical applicability in a real smart home use case. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.