An Agent Construction Model for Ubiquitous Computing Devices

Abstract

One of the main challenges for the successful application of agentbased systems in mobile and embedded devices is enabling application developers to reconcile the needs of the user to the capabilities and limitations of agents in the context of environments with changing and often limited resources. In this paper we present an attempt to move towards a solution through a framework for defining and reasoning about agents in a manner that is modular and reconfigurable at run-time. Departing from the theoretical basis afforded by the SMART framework, we extend it to enable the definition of fully re-configurable component-based agents. The guiding principles of this approach are an architecturallyneutral model that supports a separation between the description, behaviour and structure of an agent. 2 Design Principles 2.1 Desiderata for an agent construction model In order to address the range of concerns raised above and provide some statement of requirements for the agent construction model, we identify four desiderata. Although the set is not exhaustive, we consider it to be the minimum necessary set of requirements.

From SMART to agent systems development

“…Although the consequences of this are still to be completely understood, and although more work is needed, both analytical and experimental (or developmental), initial tests on PCs and high-end PDAs indicate that the difference is not significant. Through this example, and through others reported elsewhere (Ashri et al, 2003;Ashri and Luck, 2004) we have shown how the combination of SMART and actSMART can be used to support the development process of agent systems by offering three distinct but complementary views. Descriptive specification provides an abstract (and typically formal) means for systems specification, but largely ignores issues of system development.…”