Contextual Requirements Prioritization and its Application to Smart Homes

Abstract

When many requirements co-exist for a given system, prioritization is essential to determine which ones have higher priority. While the basic prioritization algorithms result in a total or partial order of the requirements, it is often the case that the priority of the requirements depends on the context at hand. This is especially true in ambient intelligence systems such as smart homes, which operate in an inherently dynamic environment that may affect the priority of the requirements at runtime. For example, depending on the health status of a smart home inhabitant, safety may become more important than comfort or cost-saving. In this paper, we make three contributions: (i) we introduce a novel method for the contextual prioritization of requirements, (ii) we propose an online platform for prioritizing the requirements for a smart home based on our method, and (iii) we report on results from an initial evaluation of the platform and the prioritization method.