Modeling and Detecting Feature Interactions among Integrated Services of Home Network Systems

Hiroshi IGAKI  Masahide NAKAMURA 

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems  Vol.E93-D  No.4  pp.822-833
Publication Date: 2010/04/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1361
Print ISSN: 0916-8532
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Software System
Keyword: 
feature interaction,  home network system,  online detection,  integrated services, 

Full Text: PDF(668.1KB)

Summary: 
This paper presents a framework for formalizing and detecting feature interactions (FIs) in the emerging smart home domain. We first establish a model of home network system (HNS), where every networked appliance (or the HNS environment) is characterized as an object consisting of properties and methods. Then, every HNS service is defined as a sequence of method invocations of the appliances. Within the model, we next formalize two kinds of FIs: (a) appliance interactions and (b) environment interactions. An appliance interaction occurs when two method invocations conflict on the same appliance, whereas an environment interaction arises when two method invocations conflict indirectly via the environment. Finally, we propose offline and online methods that detect FIs before service deployment and during execution, respectively. Through a case study with seven practical services, it is shown that the proposed framework is generic enough to capture feature interactions in HNS integrated services. We also discuss several FI resolution schemes within the proposed framework.