Agent-based modeling for developing pervasive persuasive systems

Building a cyber-physical system consisting of many reactive elements that continually interact with each other may require considerable efforts to ensure that it behaves as desired. The scale of the issues to tackle is much expanded when it comprises human-factors to analyze and change (e.g persuasion). In this paper, a development methodology is proposed for building the kind of system that developer interacts and communicates directly with the components in the domain. The developer interacts with them in simulated or runtime context in order to instruct and shape the whole system. As a technique of Agent-Based Modeling, the entire system is considered to consist of interacting (semi-) autonomous agents that can reason, adapt, and learn at runtime. This approach of development requires a particular agent architecture that can reason and learn about human activity and social conditions comprising spatial, temporal, and hierarchical structure of information. In this paper, the teachable approach is exemplified using a simulated persuasive multi-agent system for elderly care in ageing-in-place domain.