Agent-based personalized services in a mobile computing environment

Abstract

This paper proposes an agent-based service provisioning system for mobile users. It features a set of cooperative agents distributed over different sites that work together to provide personalized services for users within a mobile computing environment. For instance, when a user moves outside of his office, he would like to have a similar office environment while he is at home, in a meeting at another company, on a business trip or at a temporary location such as a hotel. Agents representing the end-users and the system agents may engage into a negotiation process to help the user access personalized services at particular site in accordance with the user's home policies and his current location policies. Adaptive Service Presentation agent is used to adapt the service presentation to the capabilities of the user's device (e.g. Workstation, Laptop, Phone, PDA). This work is part of the Mobile Agent Alliance project involving University of Ottawa, National Research Council and Mitel Corporation in Canada.