Utomatic service composition based on common-sense reasoning for ambient intelligence

The Ambient Intelligence paradigm is mainly devoted to make people life easier, by means of the so called smart spaces. To this end, the Ambient Intelligence paradigm rest upon the environment the responsibility to foresee, identify, and satisfy the arising need or requirements. These smart spaces are thought to be self-sufficient and autonomous, and therefore they are the ideal contexts for elder people, or those with some sort of disability. The fact that the context is aware of the activity in which the person is engaged enables the environment to simplify and ease the achievement of such activity, since the environment is also aware of the limitations of those people. Nevertheless, these are neither the only contexts in which Ambient Intelligence might be of a great help. On the contrary, any context capable of being monitored and supervised by means of electronic devices can be automated, from the optic of the Ambient Intelligence, in order to work in an autonomous and non-supervised manner. Besides home contexts, Ambient Intelligence can also be applied to the surveillance of buildings, on the basis of the information gathered from the sensorial devices deployed in the context. These buildings are also expected to make decisions that, grounded in the information gathered from the surroundings, once that interpreted are intended to maintain the security conditions of the building. Independently of the application contexts, there exists some common requirements or needs that are common to all of them. Basically, those environments are mainly characterized by their autonomy and self-adaption to the context changes. Ambient Intelligence environments are therefore all those that can benefit from a supervision system capable of understanding the ongoing situation and that can consequently adopt the most appropriate behavioral response. Accomplishing these task in seamless and imperceptible manner are two of the main challenges of this paradigm. The development of Ambient Intelligence systems poses an additional challenge, as it is the automatic response generation, according to the environmental needs. This is the bottleneck of the Ambient Intelligence systems which is preventing these smart spaces vision from being achieved. This thesis is mainly concerned about this problematic, and it is intended to devise a solution to this hurdle. Automatic service composition is advocated here as the enabling strategy to articulate environmental behavioral responses as though they were composite services. In order to do this, it is necessary to both, provide support for a deep understanding of the contextual situation and to hold the general knowledge that dictates how the world works, the so called common sense. Summarily, this thesis work is intended to devise an architectural solution to understand and plan the most appropriate response to the environmental arising needs for Ambient Intelligence. Adopting a common-sense approach seem to be the most plausible solution to tackle this endeavor. Basically, this thesis pretends to provide a solution for developing systems capable of imitating human behavior.