Methods for Model-Based Reasoning within Agent-Based Ambient Intelligence Applications

Within agent-based Ambient Intelligence applications agents react to humans based on information obtained by sensoring and their knowledge about human functioning. Appropriate types of reactions depend on the extent to which an agent understands the human and is able to interpret the available information (which is often incomplete, and hence multi-interpretable) in order to create a more complete internal image of the environment, including humans. Such an understanding requires that the agent has knowledge to a certain depth about the human's physiological and mental processes in the form of an explicitly represented model of the causal and dynamic relations describing these processes. In addition, given such a model representation, the agent needs reasoning methods to derive conclusions from the model and interpret the (partial) information available by sensoring. This paper presents the development of a toolbox that can be used by a modeller to design Ambient Intelligence applications. This toolbox contains a number of model-based reasoning methods and approaches to control such reasoning methods. Formal specifications in an executable temporal format are offered, which allows for simulation of reasoning processes and automated verification of the resulting reasoning traces in a dedicated software environment. A number of such simulation experiments and their formal analysis are described. The main contribution of this paper is that the reasoning methods in the toolbox have the possibility to reason using both quantitative and qualitative aspects in combination with a temporal dimension, and the possibility to perform focused reasoning based upon certain heuristic information. © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved