Emilio Serrano

One of the most promising fields for ambient intelligence is the implementation of intelligent emergency plans. Because the use of drills and living labs cannot reproduce social behaviors, such as panic attacks, that strongly affect these plans, the use of agent-based social simulation provides an approach to evaluate these plans more thoroughly. (1) The hypothesis presented in this paper is that there has been little interest in describing the key modules that these simulators must include, such as formally represented knowledge and a realistic simulated sensor model, and especially in providing researchers with tools to reuse, extend and interconnect modules from different works. This lack of interest hinders researchers from achieving a holistic framework for evaluating emergency plans and forces them to reconsider and to implement the same components from scratch over and over. In addition to supporting this hypothesis by considering over 150 simulators, this paper: (2) defines the main modules identified and proposes the use of semantic web technologies as a cornerstone for the aforementioned holistic framework; (3) provides a basic methodology to achieve the framework; (4) identifies the main challenges; and (5) presents an open and free software tool to hint at the potential of such a holistic view of emergency plan evaluation in indoor environments.

Smartphones are increasingly popular each year and have more and better sensors. These sensors are a rich information source for creating context-aware applications. Testing these applications directly in living labs is very expensive since it involves, among other things, setting up a reproduction of the environment where the application or service under test will be executed. This paper proposes the UbikMobile architecture which aims to provide developers with tools to test context-aware services based on smartphones in a simulated environment. The primary goal in UbikMobile is to reduce the faults in the software as much as possible. The main contribution is that a real smartphone, and not only an emulator, can be connected to the simulated world to conduct: (1) manual tests (i.e. the developer controls an avatar in the simulation); and, (2) automatic tests (i.e. agents in the simulation are capable of interacting automatically with the smartphone). This paper shows the main design decisions in the architecture presented to allow the interested reader to reproduce or to extend our results. It Also includes a number of case studies to illustrate how to use the architecture.