A Survey of Adaptation Systems

Development of ubiquitous applications is inherently complex. Adaptation system is a solution for ubiquitous computing. It enhances the efficiency of application by the adaptation of software, facilitates application development, and offers a good user experience. Adaptation system is faced with challenges of different research domain including context modeling, situation identification, context reasoning, and adaptation decision. In this paper we discuss the architecture design of adaptation system and the taxonomy of its key technologies in details including communication middleware, context management middleware, adaptation middleware, adaptation platform, application model and software engineering, we analyze and introduce these technologies with the most well-know ubiquitous projects. At the end, we introduce future research directions according to structural adaptation.