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AIST TODAYNo.11 Winter 2004

Contents List New Year's Greeting Feature : Ubiquitous Computing at AIST Research Hot Line In Brief

Ubiquitous Computing at AIST

Infrastructure of Ubiquitous Computing
Multi-agent Architecture CONSORTS for Ubiquitous Computing Environment
Feature
Cyber Assist Research Center
E-mail: info@carc.aist.go.jp
Authors: Takuichi Nishimura, Hideyuki Nakashima, Koichi Kurumatani

A variety of research projects on ubiquitous computing are ongoing all over the world. There are, however, few examples that provide a total formulation of architecture to integrate the entire layers from communication network to end users. For ubiquitous information societies, we find it essential to build a multiagent architecture that allows several kinds of agents to function individually in ubiquitous computing environment. This is the fundamental concept of the research project to design and implement "CONSORTS." The key concepts are as follows.

A prototype system of CONSORTS has been implemented for museum scenario where several kinds of users visit a museum and the CONSORTS service agents navigate the users and provide suitable information to them (Fig.1). The system uses FIPA-ACL based communication protocols and consists of spatio-temporal reasoner, personal agents, CONSORTS service agents, and device wrapper agents.
1. Grounding
 Information that is highly abstract "object" should be grounded in the real physical world by using sensory information.

2. Service Coordination
Physical and computational resources should be structured as agent framework where we can flexibly access information services.

3. Mass User Support
To support users as mass in order to realize innovative services that coordinate users’ preference and plans. One of the service image is dynamic resource allocation, that is, coordination among users' behaviors in traffic system or appointment system for public services by spatio-temporal resource allocation.


Fig.1
CONSORTS Application Image – Museum Scenario.

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