Automatic Device Activation Regarding High-Level Goals in Smart Environments Muhammad Sanaullah * , Fulvio Corno and Faisal Razzak Politecnico di Torino, Dipartimento di Automatica ed Informatica, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 - Torino, Italy. E-mail: sanaullah_20@hotmail.com, fulvio.corno@polito.it, raja.faisal@gmail.com Abstract Modern Smart Environments (SmE) are equipped with a multitude of devices and sensors aimed at intelligent services. The variety of devices has raised a major problem of managing SmE. An increasingly adopted solution to the problem is the modeling of goals and intentions, and then using artificial intelligence to control the respective SmE accordingly. Generally, the solution advocates that the goals can be achieved by controlling the evolution of the states of the devices. In order to automatically reach a particular state, a sophisticated solution is required through which the respective commands, notifications and their correct sequence can be discovered and enforced on the real devices. In this paper, a comprehensive methodology is proposed by considering a) the composite nature of the state of an individual device; b) the possible variation of specific commands, notifications and their sequence based on the current states of the devices. The methodology works at two levels: design-time and runtime. At design-time, it constructs the extended data and control flow behavioral graphs of the devices by using the concepts of a model checking approach. Then, at runtime, it uses these graphs for finding the reliable evolution through which the desired goal can be fulfilled. The proposed methodology is implemented over the Domotic Effects framework and a home automation system, i.e. Domotic OSGi Gateway (Dog). The implementation and experimentation details indicate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Keywords: Intelligent Device Activation, High-Level Goals, Device Interface and Behavioral Modeling, Statecharts, Model checking, Domotic Effects 1. Introduction The environments which are “richly and invisibly interwoven with sensors, actuators, displays, and com- putational elements, embedded seamlessly in the ev- eryday objects of our lives, and connected through a continuous network” for facilitating the users in per- forming their daily life tasks of varied nature are con- sidered as Smart Environments (SmE) [15,63]. The purpose of task is aimed at controlling the functional- ity of heterogeneous devices (e.g. sensors, actuators, lamps or TV) by the use of intelligent services. The services are associated with a multitude of re- sources and can relate to acquire the functionalities of a single device or a group of devices. With the growth * Corresponding author. E-mail: sanaullah_20@hotmail.com in the heterogeneous nature of devices regarding their control (various among manufactures) and offer func- tionalities, the issue of effectively managing the SmE is being raised. The trend of device-centric manage- ment [12,22,41] is going to shift with abstract mod- eling approaches [2,17,39,41]. These approaches are aimed at providing the High-Level description of the goals of SmE services for interacting and controlling the functionalities of the associated devices [51]. It is imperative to note that the accomplishment of device functionality is subjected to their required states [58,61]. Thus a goal of illuminating the bedroom can be achieved when a lamp placed inside the bedroom is in ON state; whereas, sleeping mode can be achieved by rendering all the lamps and cooking appliances in OFF state, entrance doors in LOCK state, windows in CLOSE state, bedroom window shutter in Half-Open To be used only for research purposes. The paper is accepted in Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments (JAISE). Please see: http://www.jaise-journal.org/