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Ubiquitous computing names the third wave in computing, where the personal computing
era appears when technology recedes into the background of our lives. The widespread use
of new mobile technology implementing wireless communications such as personal digital
assistants (PDAs) and smart phones enables a new type of advanced applications. In the
past years, themain focus of research in mobile services has aimed at the anytime-anywhere
principle (ubiquitous computing). However, there is more to it. The increasing demand for
distributed problem solving led to the development of multi-agent systems. The latter are
formed from a collection of independent software entities whose collective skills can be
applied in complex and real-time domains. The target of such systems is to demonstrate
how goal directed, robust and optimal behavior can arise from interactions between individual
autonomous intelligent software agents. These software entities exhibit characteristics
like autonomy, responsiveness, pro-activeness and social ability. Their functionality and
effectiveness has proven to be highly depended on the design and development and the application
domain. In fact, in several cases, the design and development of effective services
should take into account the characteristics of the context from which a service is requested.
Context is the set of suitable environmental states and settings concerning a user, which are
relevant for a situation sensitive application in the process of adapting the services and information
offered to the user. Agent technology seems to be the right technology to offer
the possibility of exploring the dynamic context of the user in order to provide added-value
services or to execute more and complex tasks. In this respect, agent-based ubiquitous
computing can benefit from marrying the agent-based technology for the extensive usage
of distributed functionality, to be deployed for lightweight devices and enable to combine
ubiquity and intelligence in different application areas and challenge with questions the
research communities in computer science, artificial intelligence and engineering. |
