Mobile Activity Coordination through Integrating Physical and Simulated Software Agents

• Main Authors: Shyh-ming Lin, 林勢敏
• Other Authors: Fu-ren Lin
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/he5w4w

博士 === 國立中山大學 === 資訊管理學系研究所 === 95 === As wireless communication services get more and more pervasively available, mobile people can easily interact with service providers and handily communicate with each other through mobile devices. In the mobile environment, mobile users can plan their activity schedules and run their schedules with the assistance of mobile devices. When mobile users are engaged in their activities, they can instantly perceive contextual information and their activity schedules therefore tend to be context dependent, i.e., mobile users may alter their objectives and decision makings as soon as the environmental context varies. Besides, for a mobile user, once any exception happens, he/she is apt to adapt his/her activity schedule to reduce the impact of the exception. In the mobile environment, since the environmental resources are limited and can’t satisfy all mobile users’ demands, conflicts are likely to occur while mobile users plan, alter or adapt their personal activity schedules. This study concentrates itself on resolving the conflicts. This conflict problem is formulated as a multi-criteria context-dependent DCOP (distributed constraint optimization problem). This problem is complicated and highly dynamic, and the joint optimality to this problem might be time-variant. This study proposes an integrated agents system SPA and a novel problem solving approach 2S-DORA to enable mobile users to coordinate their activities to maintain optimality. The SPA, which integrates the Simulated and Physical Agents, is employed to enhance mobile users’ sensory, analytic, reasoning and social abilities. The 2S-DORA takes advantage of the SPA abilities to help mobile users quickly and effectively adapt themselves to the context variations and to the exceptions. This study takes a traveling backpacker problem as an example to demonstrate how the proposed SPA and 2S-DORA contribute to solve the multi-criteria context-dependent DCOP. Five experiments finally are designed to evaluate the performance of the application of SPA and 2S-DORA.