On environment-driven software model for Internetware

Internetware is envisioned as a general software paradigm for the application style of resources integration and sharing in the open, dynamic and uncertain platforms such as the Internet. Continuing the agent-based Internetware model presented in a previous paper, in this paper, after an analysis of the behavioral patterns and the technical challenges of environment-driven applications, a software-structuring model is proposed for environment-driven Internetware applications. A series of explorations on the enabling techniques for the model, especially the modeling, management and utilization of context information are presented. Several prototypical systems have also been built to prove the concepts and evaluate the techniques. These research efforts make a further step toward the Internetware paradigm by providing an initial framework for the construction of context-aware and self-adaptive software application systems in the open network environment.