71 Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Chapter 6 DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-549-0.ch006 INTRODUCTION Ambient Intelligence (AmI) represents a new generation of computing environments equipped with a wide range of small devices and appliances present everywhere, available for everyone and at all times (Weiser, 1991). AmI technologies are mainly based on the combination of con- cepts from ubiquitous and pervasive computing Lidia Fuentes University of Malaga, Spain Nadia Gamez University of Malaga, Spain Pablo Sanchez University of Cantabria, Spain Variability in Ambient Intelligence: A Family of Middleware Solution ABSTRACT The development of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) software applications implies dealing with a wide variety of devices, which runs in different environments. These applications also target a wide range of end-users, with different needs and requirements. Software Product Lines are a relatively modern software paradigm whose main goal is to offer techniques and mechanisms to the systematic development of applications belonging to a domain with a high degree of variability. Therefore, the application of a Software Product Line for the construction of a family of middleware platforms for AmI applications should help to deal with the variability inherent to this domain. The frst step when constructing a Software Product Line (SPL) is to create some sort of model which specifes the variability of the domain the SPL targets. This model is then used as basis for confguring and automatically creating specifc products. The aim of this article is to highlight the complexity of managing different types of variability during the develop- ment of applications for AmI environments. A generic process for automatically generating a custom confguration of a middleware variant is also presented.