Design and Implementation of Prototyping Simulator of Context-Aware Applications

Although numerous context-aware applications have been developed and there have been technological advances for acquiring contextual information, it is still difficult to develop and prototype interesting context-aware applications. In this paper, we present a Graphic User Interface (GUI)-based prototyping simulator that allows end-users to visually design a wide variety of prototypes of context-aware applications, including those based on if-then rules, temporal-spatial relationships and environmental personalization. The prototyping simulator allows users to quickly prototype and test their applications without writing any code. The designed GUI is very simple and the user can create any situation based on the context by selecting the options provided in the user interface. The prototyping simulator is tested for designing a prototype of reading room, coffee shop, living room, classroom and meeting room. A series of conflict-resolving algorithms are embedded in the toolkit to resolve the conflict among users, devices and sensors. The conflict-resolving algorithms are designed using a hybrid of fuzzy logic, Bayesian probability and rough set theory.