Location-based Variability for Mobile Information Systems

Advances in size, power, and ubiquity of computing technology, sensors, and communication technology made possible the development of so-called mobile or nomadic information systems. A mobile information system has the potential to autonomously change its behaviour according to different location settings. Variability of location and system behaviour is a central feature of such new generation of information systems. This paper stresses the importance of modeling and analyzing variability of location as a basis for variability of software. We describe graphical and formal techniques to model location information, show their usage in conjunction with the goal-oriented framework i*/Tropos, and propose three analysis techniques on location-based goal models.