Benefits and requirements of using multi-agent systems on smart devices

Abstract

Due to the emergence of Internet and embedded computing, humans will be more and more faced to an increasing intrusion of computing in their day-to-day life by what it is called now smart devices. Agent characteristics like pro-activeness, autonomy and sociability and the inherent distributed nature of multi-agent systems make them a promising tool to use in the smart devices applications. This paper tries to illustrate the benefits of using multi-agent systems on smart communicating objects and discusses the need of using multiagent platforms. We then present an overview of multi-agent platforms created for use on small devices (i.e. devices with limited computing power) and for each reviewed multi-agent platform we try to identify what are its main characteristics and architectural concepts. © Springer-Verlag 2003.