Toward An Agent-Based Pluggable Infrastructure For Context-Awareness

Purpose - Pervasive computing enhances the environment by embedding many computers that are gracefully integrated with human users. The purpose of this paper is to describe the creation of a smart context-aware environment in which computation follows people and serves them everywhere. Building such smart environments is still difficult and complex due to lacking a uniform infrastructure that can adapt to diverse smart domains.Design/methodology/approach - To address this problem, the paper proposes an agent-based pluggable infrastructure which integrates a mobile agent system named pvMogent, establishes an ontology-based context model and introduces a workflow-based application model with the open services gateway initiative (OSGi) framework. By plugging corresponding domain context in ontology model and different applications, the infrastructure can be customized to various domains.Findings - Through the implementation of several context-aware applications, it was found that the infrastructure can largely reduce the development complexity as well as keep the domain extensibility by plugging corresponding domain context in ontology model.Originality/value - In this paper, a number of key techniques are explored which are suitable for building context-awareness. The experiences and lessons learned from the system development could further facilitate and inspire the research in this direction.