Context reasoning and prediction in smart environments: The home manager case

Abstract

In Smart Environments computing systems are ubiquitous, intelligence pervades the space, and people’s situatedness in time and space is exploited to provide a contextualised, adaptive user experience. Their socio-technical nature calls for skills, concepts, methodologies, technologies from diverse fields – AI, coordination, distributed systems, organisational sciences, etc. –, promoting a multi-paradigm perspective. This work explores the Smart Environments context moving from two basic bricks: Butlers for Smart Spaces, a technology-neutral reference framework focused on users’ situatedness and interaction aspects; and Home Manager, a multi-paradigm, agent-based implementation platform for Smart Living contexts, particularly focused on the reasoning aspects. For concreteness, we take a Smart Kitchen as our running example, discussing how it can be devised in Butlers for Smart Spaces and deployed on Home Manager, focusing on context reasoning and prediction aspects.