A multi-agent approach for the deployment of distributed applications in smart environments

Abstract

This paper presents an approach for the configuration,deployment and monitoring of distributed applications in a smart environment. This approach takes into consideration the heterogeneity and the dynamicity of such environments and deals with resource privacy. We propose to describe the available hardware infrastructure and the deployable applications using graphs,and provide a mathematical formalisation of the deployment process based on graph homomorphisms. A decentralised version of a branch and bound graph-matching algorithm is used to find the available hardware entities of the infrastructure that can be used to run the application,respecting its requirements. At last,we describe a goal-directed Multi-Agent System (MAS) for the deployment of applications in ambient systems. We show that the multi-agent paradigm is well-adapted to provide a clear separation between the applicative and the hardware layers,thus increasing resource privacy.