An infrastructure for distributed rule-based situation management

The development of situation-aware applications is a challenging task, requiring support from advanced techniques and implementation frameworks. That has motivated us to develop SCENE, a rule-based platform which allows rule-based situation specification and situation lifecycle management. SCENE was originally defined in a centralized setting, considering a single rule engine, working with a single set of rules and a single working memory containing all the information about the environment required to detect situations of interest. Here, we extend SCENE by providing support for (transparent) situation distribution, such that situation detection can be distributed flexibly, with parts of the rule detection functionality working on different rule engines. This enables us to accommodate a variety of distribution strategies and rule engine configurations with little developer effort. We show that the overhead introduced by distributed communication is acceptable and that a distributed situation management scenario can outperform a centralized one.