Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Agent-based architectural framework enhancing configurability, autonomy and scalability of context-aware pervasive services

  • Published:
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Multi-agent software architectures have gained in popularity due to their beneficial behavior in designing and implementing sophisticated applications. However, current approaches in implementing such architectures have led to application-specific, non-scalable implementations which limit the reusablity and improvement of the whole architecture. Moreover, these attempts lack features to enhance the user experience, thus slowing the adoption of the resulting services. In this paper we describe a fully-fledged multi-agent architecture covering a large variety of preferred features including capabilities of ‘plugging’ ubiquitous services, servicing mobile users, interconnecting remote similar architectures and interfacing with advanced software components such as knowledge bases. This framework exploits a wide-range of context-aware components making it essentially context-aware, allowing for the development of ubiquitous context-aware human-centric services, which are the focus of our research. To illustrate the flexibility of this architectural framework, we present four services which were built using this architectural paradigm by different development teams and elaborate on their overall behavior.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Altmann, J., Gruber, F., Klug, L., Stockner, W., & Weippl, E. (2001). Using mobile agents in real world: A survey and evaluation of agent platforms. In 2nd international workshop on infrastructure for agents, MAS, and scalable MAS at the 5th international conference on autonomous agents (pp. 33–39). New York: ACM Press.

  2. Azodolmolky, S., Dimakis, N., Mylonakis, V., Souretis, G., Soldatos, J., Pnevmatikakis, A., et al. (2005). Middleware for in-door ambient intelligence: The PolyOmaton system. In 4th IFIP TC-6 networking conference, 2nd next generation networking middleware workshop (NGNM) (pp. 33–39). Waterloo, Canada.

  3. Benne K., Sheats P. (1948) Functional roles of group members. Journal of Social Issues 4: 41–49

    Google Scholar 

  4. Bordini R. H., Hübner, J. F., & Vieira, R. (2005). Jason and the golden fleece of agent-oriented programming. In Multi-agent programming (pp. 3–37). US: Springer. doi:10.1007/0-387-26350-0_1.

  5. CHIL: Computers in the Human Interaction Loop. At http://chil.server.de. FP6 IST-IP506909.

  6. Coen M., Phillips B., Warshawsky N., Weisman L., Peters S., & Finin P. (1999). Meeting the computational needs of intelligent environments: The metaglue system. In 1st international workshop on managing interactions in smart environments (pp. 201–212).

  7. Cohen P.R., Cheyer A.J., Wang M., Baeg S.C. (1994) An open agent architecture. In: Etzioni O. (eds) Proceedings of the AAAI spring symposium series on software agents. American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Stanford, CA, pp 1–8

    Google Scholar 

  8. Crowley J. L. (2003) Context driven observation of human activity. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2875: 101–118

    Google Scholar 

  9. Danninger, M., Flaherty, G., Bernardin, K., Ekenel, H. K., Köhler, T., Malkin, R., et al. (2005). The connector: Facilitating context-aware communication. In ICMI ’05: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on multimodal interfaces (pp. 69–75). New York, NY: ACM Press. doi:10.1145/1088463.1088478.

  10. Dastani M. (2008) 2APL: A practical agent programming language. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 16(3): 214–248. doi:10.1007/s10458-008-9036-y

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Dertouzos M. (1999) The future of computing. Scientific American 281(2): 52–63

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Dey A., Salber D., Abowd G. (2001) A conceptual framework and a toolkit for supporting the rapid prototyping of context-aware applications. Human Computer Interaction 16: 97–166

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Dey A. K. (2001) Understanding and using context. Personal Ubiquitous Compututing Journal 5(1): 4–7. doi:10.1007/s007790170019

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Dimakis, N., Mylonakis, V., Soldatos, J., & Polymenakos, L. (2006). Reaching outside the smart space: The memory jog gateway. In 15th international conference in computing (CIC’06) (pp. 412–420). Mexico City: IEEE Computer Society. doi:10.1109/CIC.2006.57.

  15. Dimakis, N., Soldatos, J., Polymenakos, L., Schenk, M., Pfirrmann, U., & Bürkle, A. (2006). Perceptive middleware and intelligent agents enhancing service autonomy in smart spaces. In IEEE/WIC/ACM international conference on web intelligence and intelligent agent technology (pp. 276–283). Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society. doi:10.1109/IAT.2006.98.

  16. Dimakis N., Soldatos J.K., Polymenakos L., Fleury P., Cuřín J., Kleindienst J. (2008) Integrated development of context-aware applications in smart spaces. IEEE Pervasive Computing 7(4): 71–79. doi:10.1109/MPRV.2008.75

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Faci N., Guessoum Z., & Marin O. (2006). Dimax: A fault-tolerant multi-agent platform. In SELMAS ’06: Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on software engineering for large-scale multi-agent systems (pp. 13–20). New York, NY: ACM Press. doi:10.1145/1138063.1138067.

  18. FIPA. The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents. At http://www.fipa.org.

  19. Garlan D., Siewiorek D., Smailagic A., Steenkiste P. (2002) Project aura: Towards distraction-free pervasive computing. IEEE Pervasive Computing 21(2): 22–31

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Hansmann U., Merk L., Nicklous M. S., Stober T. (2003) Pervasive computing: The mobile world (Springer professional computing). Springer, New York

    Google Scholar 

  21. Helsinger, A., Thome, M., & Wright, T. (2004). Cougaar: A scalable, distributed multi-agent architecture. In IEEE international conference on systems, man and cybernetics (pp. 1910–1917).

  22. Hibernate. Relational persistence for java. At http://www.hibernate.org.

  23. Horling B., Lesser V., Vincent R., Wagner T. (2006) The soft real-time agent control architecture. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 12(1): 35–92

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. iBATIS. IBATIS Data Mapping Framework. At http://ibatis.apache.org/.

  25. Islam N., Fayad M. (2003) Toward ubiquitous acceptance of ubiquitous computing. Communications of the ACM 46(2): 89–92. doi:10.1145/606272.606302

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. JADE. Java Agent Development Environment. At http://jade.tilab.com.

  27. Jadex. BDI Agent System. At http://vsis-www.inormatik.unihamburg.de/projects/jadex.

  28. Jason. Jason: A Java-based interpreter for an extended version of agent speak. At http://jason.sourceforge.net/.

  29. Kleindienst, J., Curin, J., & Fleury, P. (2007). Reference architecture for multi-modal perceptual systems: Tooling for application development. In Intelligent environments, 2007. IE 07. 3rd IET international conference on (pp. 361–368). doi:10.1049/cp:20070393.

  30. Kumar, S., Cohen, P., & Levesque, H. J. (2000). The adaptive agent architecture: Achieving fault-tolerance using persistent broker teams. In 4th international conference on multi-agent systems (ICMAS 2000) (pp. 159–166).

  31. Kumar, S., & Cohen, P. R. (2000). Towards a fault-tolerant multi-agent system architecture. In AGENTS ’00: Proceedings of the fourth international conference on autonomous agents (pp. 459–466). New York, NY: ACM Press. doi:10.1145/336595.337570.

  32. Martin D., Cheyer A., Moran D. (1999) The open agent architecture: A framework for building distributed software systems. Applied Artificial Intelligence 13(12): 91–128. doi:10.1080/088395199117504

    Google Scholar 

  33. Minar N., Gray M., Roup O., Raffi K., Maes P. (2004) Hive: Distributed agents for networking things. IEEE Concurrency 8: 24–33

    Article  Google Scholar 

  34. Olszewski, D., & Linhard, K. (2006). Highly directional multi-beam audio loudspeaker. In Interspeech 2006

  35. Olszewski, D., Prasetyo, F., & Linhard, K. (2005). Steerable highly directional audio beam loudspeaker. In Interspeech 2005 (pp. 137–140).

  36. OWL. Web ontology language (owl). At http://www.w3.org/2004/OWL

  37. Pandis, I., Soldatos, J., Paar, A., Reuter, J., Carras, M., & Polymenakos, L. (2005). An ontology-based framework for dynamic resource management in ubiquitous computing environments. In 2nd international conference on embedded software and systems (pp. 195–203). doi:10.1109/ICESS.2005.29.

  38. Pianesi, F., & Terken, J. (2009). Computers in the human interaction Loop, chap. User-centered design of CHIL services: Introduction (pp. 179–186). Human-computer interaction series. London: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-1-84882-054-8_16.

  39. Pianesi, F., Zancanaro, M., Falcon, V., & Not, E. (2006). Towards supporting group dynamics. In Proceedings of the artificial intelligence applications and innovations (AIAI2006) (pp. 302–311).

  40. Pokahr A., Braubach L., Lamersdorf W. (2005) Jadex: A BDI reasoning engine. In: Bordini J. D. R., Dastani M., Seghrouchni A. E. F. (eds) Multi-agent programming. Springer Science+Business Media Inc., USA, pp 149–174

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  41. Pynadath, D., Tambe, M., Arens, Y., Chalupsky, H., Gil, Y., Knoblock, C., et al. (2000). Electric elves: Immersing an agent organization in a human organization. In Proceedings of the AAAI fall symposium on socially intelligent agents—The human in the Loop. Menlo Park, CA: The AAAI Press.

  42. Rao, A.S. (1996). AgentSpeak(L): BDI agents speak out in a logical computable language. In R. van Hoe (Ed.), Seventh European workshop on modelling autonomous agents in a multi-agent world, Lecture notes in artificial intelligence (Vol. 1038, pp. 42–55). Berlin: Springer Verlag.

  43. Saif, U., Pham, H., Paluska, J. M., Waterman, J., Terman, C., & Ward, S. (2003). A case for goal-oriented programming semantics. In 5th annual conference on ubiquitous computing (UbiComp ’03) (pp. 74–83).

  44. Scerri, P., Pynadath, D., & Tambe, M. (2001). Adjustable autonomy in real-world multi-agent environments. In AGENTS ’01: Proceedings of the fifth international conference on autonomous agents (pp. 300–307). New York, NY: ACM. doi:10.1145/375735.376314.

  45. Shi Y., Xie W., Xu G., Shi R., Chen E., Mao Y. et al (2003) The smart classroom: Merging technologies for seamless tele-education. IEEE Pervasive Computing 2(2): 47–55. doi:10.1109/MPRV.2003.1203753

    Article  Google Scholar 

  46. Šišlák D., Rehák M., Pěchouček M., Rollo M., Pavlíček D. (2005) A-globe: Agent development platform with inaccessibility and mobility support. In: Unland R., Klusch M., Calisti M. (eds) Software agent-based applications, platforms and development kits. Birkhauser Verlag, Basel, pp 21–46

    Google Scholar 

  47. Soldatos J., Dimakis N., Stamatis K., Polymenakos L. (2007) A breadboard architecture for pervasive context-aware services in smart spaces: Middleware components and prototype applications. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing Journal 11(2): 193–212. doi:10.1007/s00779-006-0102-7

    Article  Google Scholar 

  48. Soldatos J., Pandis I., Stamatis K., Polymenakos L., Crowley J. L. (2007) Agent based middleware infrastructure for autonomous context-aware computing services. Computer Communications Magazine, special Issue on Emerging Middleware for Next Generation Networks 30(3): 577–591. doi:10.1016/j.comcom.2005.11.018

    Google Scholar 

  49. Soldatos J., Stamatis K., Azodolmolky S., Pandis I., Polymenakos L. (2007) Semantic web technologies for ubiquitous computing resource management in smart spaces. International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology 3(4): 353–373. doi:10.1504/IJWET.2007.014438

    Article  Google Scholar 

  50. Stanford V. (2002) Pervasive computing goes to work: Interfacing to the enterprise. IEEE Pervasive Computing 01(3): 6–12. doi:10.1109/MPRV.2002.1037716

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  51. Sycara K., Paolucci M., Velsen M. V., Giampapa J. A. (2003) The RETSINA MAS infrastructure. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 7(1/2): 29–48. doi:10.1023/A:1024172719965

    Article  Google Scholar 

  52. Tambe M., Min Shen W., Mataric M., Pynadath D. V., Goldberg D., Modi P. J., et al. (1999). Teamwork in cyberspace: Using TEAMCORE to make agents team-ready. In Proceedings of the AAAI spring symposium on agents in cyberspace (pp. 136–141). Menlo Park, CA: The AAAI Press.

  53. TopLink. At http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/ias/toplink/index.html.

  54. Torque. At http://db.apache.org/torque/.

  55. UltraLog. The ultralog project. At http://ultralog.net.

  56. Weiser M. (1991) The computer for the 21st century. Scientific American 9(9): 94–104

    Article  Google Scholar 

  57. Zorzo, A. F., & Meneguzzi, F. R. (2005). An agent model for fault-tolerant systems. In SAC ’05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM symposium on Applied computing (pp. 60–65). New York, NY: ACM Press. doi:10.1145/1066677.1066696.

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Intelligent Systems and Networks Group, Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department, Imperial College, London, SW7 2BT, UK

    Nikolaos Dimakis

  2. Athens Information Technology, 0.8Km Markopoulou Avenue, 19002, Peania, Greece

    John Soldatos & Lazaros Polymenakos

  3. Fraunhofer Institute for Information and Data Processing, Fraunhoferstraße 1, 76131, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Axel Bürkle, Uwe Pfirrmann & Gerhard Sutschet

Authors
  1. Nikolaos Dimakis
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. John Soldatos
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Lazaros Polymenakos
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Axel Bürkle
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Uwe Pfirrmann
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Gerhard Sutschet
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nikolaos Dimakis.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Dimakis, N., Soldatos, J., Polymenakos, L. et al. Agent-based architectural framework enhancing configurability, autonomy and scalability of context-aware pervasive services. Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst 21, 36–68 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-009-9101-1

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-009-9101-1

Keywords

Search

Navigation