Conor Muldoon

Agent factory micro edition: a framework for ambient applications

Ambient Intelligence represents a vision of the future whereby the world will be saturated with embedded electronic devices that are sensitive and responsive to people. This technology will combine the concepts of intelligent systems with that of pervasive computing. Intelligent agents of varying capabilities will provide the foundations for many applications within this domain. As a means of achieving this objective a framework – Agent Factory Micro Edition (AFME) has been developed to enable the creation of agent-based applications on computationally constrained devices such as cellular digital mobile phones. It has been specifically designed to tackle the performance and memory footprint issues associated with executing intentional agents on mobile devices.

Towards Pervasive Intelligence: Reflections on the Evolution of the Agent Factory Framework

Agent Factory is a cohesive framework for the development and deployment of multi-agentsystems. Since its inception in the mid 1990s, Agent Factory has gone through a metamorphosis process, whereby several new extensions, revisions, and enhancements have been made. This chapter provides a discussion of the incremental developments in Agent Factory and provides motivations as to why such changes were necessary. Agent Factory distinguishes itself from other intentional agent platforms in several ways. It provides a practical and efficient approach to the development of intentional agent-oriented applications. This is combined with a methodology, integrated development environment support, and a suite of tools that aid the agent fabrication process. Adetailed comparison to related work is provided. We include a tutorial on how to use the framework.

Embedded agents: a paradigm for mobile services

Mobile computing radically challenges some of the traditional assumptions associated with the software development life cycle, and end-user behaviour. Successfully meeting these challenges is of fundamental importance if mobile computing is to fulfil its considerable potential. One approach to this concerns the prudent and selective adoption of intelligent techniques. However, reconciling the conflicting demands of deploying sophisticated resource-intensive computational algorithms on devices that are inherently resource-poor raises significant difficulties. Recent developments in intelligent agent technologies offer one viable approach to resolving this conflict. This paper explores the state of the art in mobile computing and intelligent agents. In particular, issues pertinent to the deployment of agents on mobile devices are considered in detail. To illuminate this discussion, the implementation of one such framework is described.

Agent Migration and Communication in WSNs

Intelligent agents offer a viable paradigm for enabling AmI applications and services. As WSN technologies are anticipated to provide an indispensable component in many application domains, the need for enabling the agent paradigm to encompass such technologies becomes more urgent. The resource-constrained ad-hoc nature of WSNs poses significant challenges to conventional agent frameworks. In particular, the implications for agent functionality and behaviour in a WSN context demand that issues such as unreliable message delivery and limited power resources, amongst others, be considered. In this paper, the practical issues of agent migration and communication are considered in light of WSN constraints. The discussion is illustrated through a description of approaches adopted by Agent Factory Micro Edition (AFME).

ACCESS: An Agent Architecture for Ubiquitous Service Delivery

This paper introduces the Agents Channeling ContExt Sensitive Services (ACCESS) architecture, an agent-based architecture that supports the development and deployment of context sensitive services. Specifically, ACCESS is comprised of two sub-systems: a run-time system that delivers the minimum functionality necessary to execute ACCESS Agents, and a development environment that delivers structured tool-based support for the creation, development, and visualization of u-commerce services.

Sensor Web interaction

Ubiquitous sensing fuses the concepts of intelligent systems with ubiquitous computing in the development of novel Sensor Web applications, whereby the interaction of multiple disparate autonomous artefacts is a key requirement. In this paper, we present SIXTH, which is a middleware infrastructure for Ubiquitous Sensing that facilitates, and supports, the development and deployment of Sensor Web applications. SIXTH has been designed to be extensible, with provisions for user definable data retention policies, custom sensor data representations, and custom sensor node representations, whilst still providing a rich set of default behaviours. Within SIXTH, support is provided for the development and interaction of applications that incorporate both physical and cyber (virtual server side) sensors. With a view to supporting intelligent, in network, interaction policies, whereby sensor nodes must negotiate and coordinate their behaviour, the system has been designed to operate in conjunction with Agent Factory Micro Edition (AFME). AFME is a minimised footprint intelligent agent platform designed for resource constrained devices. It is based on the standard Agent Factory platform, which was developed for desktop machines, and is representative of a class of agent systems, which are referred to as Agent Oriented Programming frameworks. The paper discusses a ubiquitous mapping application that was developed using the middleware.

Towards reflective mobile agents for resource-constrained mobile devices

The vision of ubiquitous computing is one in which resource constrained mobile devices form ad-hoc networks to enable the delivery of services that are sensitive and responsive to people. Such networks are dynamic and must be capable of dealing with uncertain information. As emergent system behaviour begins to evolve the complexity of pervasive systems increases. The agent development community have been addressing issues of complexity and uncertainty, within distributed computing, for several years. This paper details the migration process of Agent Factory Micro Edition (AFME), a minimised footprint agent platform for resource constrained mobile devices. The process enables agents to migrate from a resource rich environment to a resource constrained mobile device and vice versa. It requires agents to dynamically alter their form and behaviour so as to adapt to their context.

Collaborative agent tuning: performance enhancement on mobile devices

Ambient intelligence envisages a world saturated with sensors and other embedded computing technologies, operating transparently, and accessible to all in a seamless and intuitive manner. Intelligent agents of varying capabilities may well form the essential constituent entities around which this vision is realized. However, the practical realization of this vision will severely exacerbate the complexity of existing software solutions, a problem that autonomic computing was originally conceived to address. Thus we can conjecture that the incorporation of autonomic principles into the design of Multi-Agent Systems is indeed a desirable objective. As an illustration of how this may be achieved, a strategy termed Collaborative Agent Tuning is described, which seeks to optimise agent performance on computationally limited devices. A classic mobile computing application is used to illustrate the principles involved.

Embedding intelligent decision making within complex dynamic environments

Decision-making is a complex and demanding process often constrained in a number of possibly conflicting dimensions including quality, responsiveness and cost. This paper considers in situ decision making whereby decisions are effected based upon inferences made from both locally sensed data and data aggregated from a sensor network. Such sensing devices that comprise a sensor network are often computationally challenged and present an additional constraint upon the reasoning process. This paper describes a hybrid reasoning approach to deliver in situ decision making which combines stream based computing with multi-agent system techniques. This approach is illustrated and exercised through an environmental demonstrator project entitled SmartBay which seeks to deliver in situ real time environmental monitoring.

ACCESS: an agent based architecture for the rapid prototyping of location aware services

We describe the Agents Channelling ContExt Sensitive Services (ACCESS) architecture, an open agent-based architecture that supports the development and deployment of multiple heterogeneous context sensitive services. We detail the ACCESS architecture and describe the scenario of an individual arriving in a city and using his ACCESS enabled PDA to secure lodgings.