ArticlePublisher preview available

Designing a goal-oriented smart-home environment

February 2018
Information Systems Frontiers 20(1)

DOI:10.1007/s10796-016-9670-x

Authors:

J. Palanca

Universitat Politècnica de València

Elena Del Val Noguera

Universitat Politècnica de València

Ana García-Fornes

Universitat Politècnica de València

Holger Billhardt

King Juan Carlos University

Show all 6 authorsHide

Nowadays, systems are growing in power and in access to more resources and services. This situation makes it necessary to provide user-centered systems that act as intelligent assistants. These systems should be able to interact in a natural way with human users and the environment and also be able to take into account user goals and environment information and changes. In this paper, we present an architecture for the design and development of a goal-oriented, self-adaptive, smart-home environment. With this architecture, users are able to interact with the system by expressing their goals which are translated into a set of agent actions in a way that is transparent to the user. This is especially appropriate for environments where ambient intelligence and automatic control are integrated for the user’s welfare. In order to validate this proposal, we designed a prototype based on the proposed architecture for smart-home scenarios. We also performed a set of experiments that shows how the proposed architecture for human-agent interaction increases the number and quality of user goals achieved.

Execution framework based on DGOC formal model.

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General view of the proposed use case

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Shortest path of the plan.

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Plan graph of the proposed use case

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Study degree of success finding a plan.

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Inf Syst Front (2018) 20:125–142

DOI 10.1007/s10796-016-9670-x

Designing a goal-oriented smart-home environment

Javier Palanca1·Elena del Val1·Ana Garcia-Fornes1·Holger Billhardt3·

Juan Manuel Corchado2·Vicente Juli´

an1

Published online: 11 July 2016

Abstract Nowadays, systems are growing in power and

in access to more resources and services. This situation

makes it necessary to provide user-centered systems that act

as intelligent assistants. These systems should be able to

interact in a natural way with human users and the envi-

ronment and also be able to take into account user goals

and environment information and changes. In this paper,

we present an architecture for the design and development

of a goal-oriented, self-adaptive, smart-home environment.

With this architecture, users are able to interact with the

system by expressing their goals which are translated into

a set of agent actions in a way that is transparent to the

user. This is especially appropriate for environments where

ambient intelligence and automatic control are integrated

for the user’s welfare. In order to validate this proposal,

we designed a prototype based on the proposed architec-

ture for smart-home scenarios. We also performed a set of

experiments that shows how the proposed architecture for

human-agent interaction increases the number and quality

of user goals achieved.

Elena del Val

edelval@dsic.upv.es

1Departamento de Sistemas Inform´

aticos y Computaci´

on,

Universitat Polit`

ecnica de Val`

encia, Val`

encia, Spain

2Department of Computer Science, University of Salamanca,

Salamanca, Spain

3CETINIA, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain

Keywords Multi-agent systems ·Smart-home

environments ·Adaptive systems ·Goal-oriented systems ·

Service-oriented systems

1 Introduction

Collaboration is an important factor in achieving success

in any type of work or project. In general, any task with

hints of complexity requires the collaboration of more than

one individual. Technology should be capable of support-

ing these collaboration processes through the formation and

management of groups or coalitions of entities that which

can be humans or software agents. These groups or coali-

tions can arise in a spontaneous or planned manner in order

to maximize the expected utility or profit of the individuals.

Agent technology enables the development of applications

that support the formation and management of such organi-

zations dynamically. Applications of this kind are possible

through the use of a goal-oriented architecture for human-

agent societies, where the traditional notion of application

disappears. Rather than developing software applications

that accomplish computational tasks for specific purposes,

the goal-oriented approach in these human-agent societies

is based on the immersion of users in self-adaptive envi-

ronments that facilitate the achievement of their goals in an

automated way.

This new way of envisioning applications requires new

methods and techniques that support the integration of

humans and software agents, considering agents as ser-

vice/resource providers. Taking this into consideration, one

of the main problems is how to show all the available ser-

vices and resources to users in an appropriate way. As the

Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.

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