Smart Shadow: Platform to Provide Real-World Services in Ubiquitous Environments and Its Applications

Recently, ubiquitous environments have been extensively studied, and hardware environments (e.g., network or small devices) will be available soon. When the hardware environments become available, problems related to service provisioning will still remain. Device (resource) conflict or service conflict will occur in multi-user actual ubiquitous environments. The methods to solve these problems, which are used in current systems, are to enumerate all the cases and solve any conflict before service execution. However, these methods lack generality and thus cannot be applied to unexpected cases. To solve this problem, we are now developing a new service platform called Smart Shadow. On the Smart Shadow platform, users, services, devices, and fields are treated as agents. In addition, communication and interaction among the agents aim to solve device and service conflicts. The prototype of the Smart Shadow platform and an example application using the platform are described. We have already exhibited Smart Shadow and an application implementation to the public and have conducted a preliminary evaluation. Our developed Smart Shadow will contribute to service provisioning in future ubiquitous environments.