Augmenting BDI with relevance: supporting agent-based, pervasive applications

The potential of pervasive mobile systems lies in the integrationof applications and services available on mobile devices.These services must be built on the premises of context awareness,such that the application takes advantage of environmentalinformation to improve its performance. Thechallenge is to process more environmental information withthe limited computational resources available on mobile devices.Intelligent Agents have been proposed as a suitable architecturefor these tasks. Such agents are designed around adeliberation cycle. We show that one of the problems agentsencounter in highly dynamic environments is that this cyclemisses opportunities to react to the changing environment.For this reason we propose an extra module that augmentsagent architecures with a “context-observer”. Based on thestructures used in the deliberation cycle, this module evaluatesthe relevance of received data. It does this parallel tothe normal cycle. We illustrate how such an approach couldimprove the context sensitivity of the agent’s behaviour andthus the usefulness of the application.May 200