A context-aware reasoning framework for heterogeneous systems

The emergence and penetration of smart devices and software technologies are evolving towards new generation of the systems under the name of context-awareness. Context awareness highlights the significance of contexts to be utilized to ease user's tasks and fulfill their desired objectives. Context-aware systems acquire contextual information from sensors, embedded sensors in smart devices and information system, perform reasoning and then adapt their behavior accordingly. With the advent of mobile devices such as smart phones, GPS system, PDAs, and wireless sensor nodes, context-aware systems are getting to be progressively prevalent nowadays. These systems are heterogeneous in nature and run in a highly decentralized environment. However, the imperfect nature of context causes inconsistent behavior of the system. This paper presents a contextual defeasible reasoning(CDL) based conceptual framework for context-aware multi-agent system, which uses the notion of multi-context system and distributed semantic knowledge sources, to model the heterogeneous system and state interesting resource bounded as well as conflicting properties of the system. We illustrate our approach using a smart rescue system and show context-aware agents' reasoning processes.