The LAICA Project: An ad-hoc middleware to support Ambient Intelligence

Our everyday environments are going to be disseminated of devices and sensors that exhibit some degree of autonomy and that collaborate to support users in their activities. This envisions a not-so-far future called "Ambient Intelligence", i.e., environments that show a certain degree of intelligence. Useful abstractions for Ambient Intelligence are represented by software agents, since they are autonomous and capable of acting on behalf of their owners. In the context of the LAICA project we have exploited the agent paradigm to model devices and sensors, and have developed an ad-hoc middleware to orchestrate all the involved components. This paper discusses the adoption of agents in Ambient Intelligence, and explains the design and implementation of the middleware