ATRACO: Adaptive and Trusted Ambient Ecologies

Abstract

ATRACO is an EU funded R&D project that considers ambient ecologies consisting of people, context-aware artefacts and digital commodities (e.g., services and content). Members of the ecology are able to adapt to each other and form trusted ad hoc collaborations to achieve specific tasks resulting from the need to serve specific human goals. Our aim is to research the factors and develop the technologies that will lead to the realisation of such ecologies, following an interdisciplinary effort which involves Computer Science, HCI, AI, Control Theory and Sociology. Key factors of the ATRACO problem space to be examined include adaptation, interoperability, user interaction and dynamicity of trust. We focus our efforts on seeking abstractions and mechanisms for establishing trust relationships between its members and on devising adaptation mechanisms based on system behaviour modelling, supervisory control theory of discrete event systems and type-2 fuzzy systems.