Interaction patterns for refining behaviour specifications of context-aware mobile services

In the context of Model-Driven Architecture (MDA), little attention has been given to behavioural aspects of service design. This paper proposes a MDA-based approach that considers these aspects in the development of context-aware mobile services. Starting from the specification of the external observable behaviour of a service, we gradually refine this behaviour considering the internal structure of the service. Particularly, we present a structure that is general enough to be used for several context-aware mobile services. However, it may be configured based on the specific service to be developed. An important step of our approach consists of identifying sequences of interactions, which we call interaction patterns, which can be mapped into a behaviour model of the components that execute the service. This model is platform-independent and may be realized in terms of several specific target technologies.