Bridging the Gap between Smart Home and Agents

Noticeable, within the area of Smart Homes, Intelligent Environment and/or Ambient Assisted Living the research deviates into two main branches. On the one hand, there are the agent-based distributed approaches providing intelligent services with focus on data analysis. On the other hand there are the centralized middleware platforms with the main focus on interfacing appliances and services and providing accessible user personalized and interfaces. To bridge this gap, we propose to integrate FIPA Specifications compliant MAS approaches with a standardized middleware platform, the ISO/IEC 24752 Universal Remote Console (URC). By doing so, we resolve two problems that have been neglected so far. Firstly, we provide for MASs a standardized way of interfacing arbitrary appliances and services. Secondly, we allow to deploy personalized and accessible user interfaces for MAS. Additionally, from the point of view of the URC technology, we provide a uniform way to interact with agents. We illustrate the capabilities of the proposed framework with a centralized, decentralized, and hybrid setup scenario.