Feature Interactions in Integrated Services of Networked Home Appliances

This paper proposes a service-centric framework for the feature interaction problem in integrated services of the home network system (HNS). To formalize the HNS, we extensively use an object-oriented approach where each networked appliance (or the HNS environment) is modeled as an object consisting of properties and methods. Based on the model, we define two types of feature interactions: appliance interactions and environment interactions. An appliance interaction occurs on an appliance object when different services try to invoke methods that perform incompatible updates or references for common properties of the appliance. An environment interaction occurs when methods of different appliances indirectly conflict via the environment object. We conduct a case study of offline interaction detection among several practical service scenarios. It is shown that the proposed framework is quite generic enough to capture the potential interactions in the HNS. We also discuss the feasibility to online detection and several resolution schemes.