Smart environments as agent workspaces

The pervasive computing scenario provides a diffused presence of technological appliances distributed in the environment and interacting by means of wired or wireless networks. These computational units should be able to fruitfully exploit interactions with other components (e.g. information sources) in order to supply context aware services and support advanced forms of interaction among users. The aim of this paper is to show how models and frameworks for Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) can be exploited to design and implement pervasive computing systems, focusing on the Agent and Artifact (A&A) approach. Artifacts are a conceptual, formal and computational framework supporting the realization of function-oriented elements of a MAS. After a description of a scenario, the paper briefly introduces the A&A framework and shows how it can be used to define an infrastructure supporting complex interaction schemes provided by the scenario