A context-aware multi-agent service system for assistive home applications

Abstract

In this paper, we present an Ontology-based Context-aware multi-Agent Service System(OCASS) architecture to provide these context-aware services in a smart home. To model various contexts, we design Ontology which supports to share context knowledge, detect and resolve inconsistency of the knowledge. In addition, we classify context-aware services into three layers - Session, Task, Subtask - to make sure definition of service conflict problems and to solve the problems easily. With our context model and the classification of service conflicts, our system supports autonomic tasks including recognizing and learning user's formal/informal activity pattern, and resolving conflicts between services in different situations of users invisibly. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.