City Research Online

Abstract

Advances in ubiquitous computing have resulted in changes to the way we access and use everyday applications, e.g. reading mail and booking tickets. At the same time, users interact with these applications in a variety of ways, each with different characteristics, e.g., different degrees of bandwidth, different payment schemes supported and so on. These are highly dynamic interactions, as some of the applications might become unavailable (either temporarily or permanently) or their behaviour may change. As the user has to deal with a large number of proactive and dynamic applications every day, he will need a personal assistant that possesses similar characteristics. The agent paradigm meets this requirement, since it exhibits the necessary features. As a result, the user will provide its personal agent assistant with a goal, e.g. I need a smartphone which costs less than three hundred pounds, and the agent will have to use a number of applications offering information on smartphones so that it finds the requested one. This, in turn, raises a number of issues regarding the organisation and the degrees of access to these services as well as the correctness of their descriptions.

In this work, we propose the organisation of applications around the concept of artificial agent societies, to which access would be possible only by a positive evaluation of an agent's application. The agent will provide the Authority Agent with the role it is applying for and its competencies in the context of a protocol, i.e., the messages that it can utter/understand. The Authority Agent will then check to see if the applicant agent is a competent user of the protocols; if yes, entry is granted.

Assuming that access is granted, the next issue is to decide on the protocol(s) that agent receives. As providing the full protocol will cause security and overload problems, we only need to provide the part required for the agent to play its role. We show how this can be done and how we can repair certain protocols so that they are indeed enactable once this role decomposition is performed.

Publication Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Additional Information:	© 2011 George K. Lekeas
Subjects:	Z Bibliography. Library Science. Information Resources > ZA Information resources > ZA4050 Electronic information resources
Departments:	Doctoral Theses School of Science & Technology > Computer Science School of Science & Technology > School of Science & Technology Doctoral Theses

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