Organizing ad hoc agents for human-agent service matching

Ambient intelligence, distributed agent systems, smart buildings and other emerging architectures leave the user lost between large amounts of autonomous entities or agents. With agents in cars, personal devices and other mobile systems, the set of agents available to the user can change rapidly, adding to the problems. We propose a set of agent relations to organize agents in an ad hoc situation. There are dynamic task-, location- and user relations, creating multiple relation hierarchies in agent space. These hierarchies allow robust, space- and task limited, context-sensitive search through agent space. We show how to use this structure to keep user interfaces near the user, and how it can be used to support the user in finding the agent he needs in a context-sensitive way.