Smart Auctions for Autonomic Ambient Intelligence Systems

The main goal of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is to support users in their daily activities by satisfying and anticipating their needs. To achieve such goal, AmI systems rely on physical infrastructures made of heterogenous sensing devices which interact in order to exchange information and perform monitoring tasks. In such a scenario, a full achievement of AmI vision would also require the capability of the system to autonomously check the status of the infrastructure and supervise its maintenance. To this aim, in this paper, we extend some previous works in order to allow the self-management of AmI devices enabling them to directly interact with maintenance service providers. In particular, the combination of smart contracts and blockchains enables AmI systems to autonomously communicate with untrusted entities and complete secure transactions without the brokering of a trusted third party. The proposed approach has been adopted to design a sample AmI application capable of managing requests from faulty devices in a Smart home.