SUMMARY Pervasive computing applications involve both software concerns, such as any software system, and integration concerns, for the constituent networked devices of the pervasive computing environment. This situation is problematic for testing because it requires acquiring, testing, and interfacing a variety of software and hardware entities. This process can rapidly become costly and time‐consuming when the target environment involves many entities. This paper introduces DiaSim, a simulator for pervasive computing applications. To cope with widely heterogeneous entities, DiaSim is parameterized with respect to a description of a target pervasive computing environment. This description is used to generate both a programming framework to develop the simulation logic and an emulation layer to execute applications. Furthermore, a simulation renderer is coupled to DiaSim to allow a simulated pervasive system to be visually monitored and debugged. DiaSim has been implemented and used to simulate various pervasive computing systems in different application areas, demonstrating the generality of our parameterized approach. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Smart buildings promise to revolutionize the way we live. Applications ranging from climate control to fire management can have significant impact on the quality and cost of these services. However, smart buildings and any technology with direct effect on human safety and life must undergo extensive testing. Virtual testing by means of computer simulation can significantly reduce the cost of testing and, as a result, accelerate the development of novel applications. Unfortunately, building physically-accurate simulation codes can be labor intensive. To address this problem, we propose a framework for rapid, physically-accurate virtual testing. The proposed framework supports analytical modeling of both a discrete distributed system as well as the physical environment that hosts it. The discrete models supported are accurate enough to allow the automatic generation of a dedicated programming framework that will help the developer in the implementation of these systems. The physical environment models supported are equational specifications that are accurate enough to produce running simulation codes. Combined, these two frameworks enable simulating both active systems and physical environments. These simulations can be used to monitor the behavior and gather statistics about the performance of an application in the context of precise virtual experiments. To illustrate the approach, we present models of Heating, Ventilating and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) systems. Using these models, we construct virtual experiments that illustrate how the approach can be used to optimize energy and cost of climate control for a building.

Despite much progress, developing a pervasive computing application remains a challenge because of a lack of conceptual frameworks and supporting tools. This challenge involves coping with heterogeneous devices, overcoming the intricacies of distributed systems technologies, working out an architecture for the application, encoding it in a program, writing specific code to test the application, and finally deploying it. This paper presents a design language and a tool suite covering the development life-cycle of a pervasive computing application. The design language allows us to define a taxonomy of area-specific building-blocks, abstracting over their heterogeneity. This language also includes a layer to define the architecture of an application, following an architectural pattern commonly used in the pervasive computing domain. Our underlying methodology assigns roles to the stakeholders, providing separation of concerns. Our tool suite includes a compiler that takes design artifacts written in our language as input and generates a programming framework that supports the subsequent development stages, namely, implementation, testing, and deployment. Our methodology has been applied on a wide spectrum of areas. Based on these experiments, we assess our approach through three criteria: expressiveness, usability, and productivity.

Pervasive computing applications involve both software concerns, like any software system, and integration concerns, for the constituent networked devices of the pervasive computing environment. This situation is problematic for testing because it requires acquiring, testing and interfacing a variet

Pervasive computing applications involve both software concerns, like any software system, and integration concerns, for the constituent networked devices of the pervasive computing environment. This situation is problematic for testing because it requires acquiring, testing and interfacing a variet

Pervasive computing applications involve both software concerns, like any software system, and integration concerns, for the constituent networked devices of the pervasive computing environment. This situation is problematic for testing because it requires acquiring, testing and interfacing a variety of software and hardware entities. This process can rapidly become costly and time-consuming when the target environment involves many entities. In this demonstration, we present DiaSim, a simulator for pervasive computing applications. To cope with widely heterogeneous entities, DiaSim is parameterized with respect to a description of a target pervasive computing environment. This description is used to generate both a programming framework to develop the simulation logic and an emulation layer to execute applications. Furthermore, a simulation renderer is coupled to DiaSim to allow a simulated pervasive system to be visually monitored and debugged.