Mobility and Adaptation Enabling Middleware (MADAM)

(Funded by European Commission)

Computers and networking technology are becoming an integral part of our living and working environment. The increasing mobility and pervasiveness of computing and communication enables new services and applications that can improve quality of work and life. However, the constant change in mobile environments and devices – e.g. network, battery, light and noise conditions – poses a significant challenge to developers. To retain usability, usefulness, and dependability applications need to adapt to the changing operating environment and the context in which they are used. Existing software development methodology and middleware technology do not support such dynamically adaptive applications.

The overall objective of MADAM is to provide software engineers with modelling language extensions, tools and middleware that collectively foster the design, implementation and operation of innovative applications and services for the mobile user and worker. To achieve this objective MADAM will study the adaptivity requirements of mobile applications and develop a theory of adaptation. A set of reusable adaptation strategies and adaptation mechanisms, based on a dynamically reconfigurable component architecture will be developed. Modelling language extensions and tools will enable application designers to specify adaptation capabilities at design time.

MADAM will provide prototype implementations of the reference middleware platform as well as appropriate modelling tool extensions. Pilot applications will be developed to validate the approach and the prototype implementations. The project puts considerable emphasis on the dissemination and commercial exploitation of the results. Therefore, strong and focused industry partners are included in the consortium.

The MADAM project aims towards simplifying the design and implementation of mobile adaptive applications. This is necessary to bring out the best of the exciting new possibilities of next generation mobile computing technology.