Dynamic Profile-Selection for zSlices based type-2 fuzzy agents controlling multi-user Ambient Intelligent Environments

Abstract

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is a vision that refers to an information technology paradigm where a physical environment is aware of its human occupants' presence/context and is sensitive, adaptive and responsive to their needs. Physical environments that are augmented with AmI are called Ambient Intelligent Environments (AIEs) which are deemed to be intelligent because the system should be able to recognise human occupants, reason with context and program itself to meet the occupants' needs by learning from their behaviour [1]. However, there is a need also to deal with real-world scenarios which involve multiple users occupying a given AIE. In order to handle multi-user AIEs and control them, there is a need to have agents that are able to learn the user(s) behaviours and handle the intra and inter-user uncertainties as people have different preferences and profiles which continuously change. In this paper, we present a zSlices based type-2 fuzzy agent which employs zSlices general type-2 fuzzy systems to learn the user(s) preferences and profiles and handle the encountered intra and inter-user uncertainties. The agent will behave according to a learned user profile that is unique to an individual user or a group of users and so the profile-selection problem manifests when the set of users in an AIE changes (i.e. when people enter/ leave an AIE). The proposed agent employs a novel strategy that we call Dynamic Profile-Selection that uses a cloud-based profile repository in order to support the agent activity in multiple AIEs. To demonstrate the proposed approach, we have conducted real-world experiments on two distinct AIEs which are the intelligent apartment (iSpace) and the intelligent Classroom (iClassroom) located at the University of Essex. © 2012 IEEE.