Abstract
In the pervasive computing environment consisting of peers (a generic name for clients, servers or agents), context-awareness plays an important role to offer personalized services for various applications, e.g., medical services, robotics, travel planning, security monitoring, and multi-player gaming. Accordingly, context management turns out to be an important issue in manipulating, acquiring information and reacting to the situation. In this paper, we describe a contract-based workflow paradigm to support long and short duration transactions in a context-aware pervasive computing environment. This paradigm provides for software contract that captures mutual obligations using program constructs such as “require [else]” for precondition and “ensure [then]” for post condition, assertions, invariants needed in the pervasive computing environment. Such program constructs are essential to deal with the uncertain nature of connectivity of pervasive devices and networks, and the trial-error (subjunctive) nature of the processes and the programs used in E-commerce, robotics and multi-player gaming.