A butler agent for personalized house control

Abstract

This paper illustrates our work concerning the development of an agent-based architecture for the control of a smart home environment. In particular, we focus the description on a particular component of the system: the Butler Interactor Agent (BIA). BIA has the role of mediating between the agents controlling environment devices and the user. As any good butler, it is able to observe and learn about users preferences but it leaves to its "owner" the last word on critical decisions. This is possible by employing user and context modeling techniques in order to provide a dynamic adaptation of the interaction with the environment according to the vision of ambient intelligence. Moreover, in order to support trust, this agent is able to adapt its autonomy on the basis of the received user delegation. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.