Self-organizing device cooperation

Researcher: Christiane Reisse

Runtime: 2/2007 - 1/2009

Smart environments contain lots of interconnected devices which should cooperate in order to assist users in fulfilling their tasks. In our group, we focus on ad-hoc smart meeting rooms, where an ensemble consisting of stationary devices (e.g. video projectors, canvasses) as well as mobile devices brought in by users (such as notebooks and PDAs) are supposed to help a user to give a presentation. Thus, the user should not be bothered with connecting his notebook to a projector or switching off the lights, but the projector should fetch the user's presentation from his notebook, display it on a canvas and darken the room for the presentation. Due to the dynamic nature of the ensemble, we cannot rely on the existence of any particular device that could organize the cooperation of the ensemble. For ad-hoc environments, room control must thus be entirely distributed. Therefore, we investigate techniques which rely on self-organization. We are currently working on an agent-based mechanism for controlling ad-hoc smart meeting rooms. This distributed approach works without any top-level knowledge. Based on the current state of the environment and the user's goals (provided by the Intention analysis) and the actions each device can perform, an action sequence that fulfills the user's goals is generated. This action sequence is not constructed explicitly, as in classical planning, but arises as a side-effect of the devices' interactions.