An Architecture That Supports Task-Centered Adaptation In Intelligent Environments

The realization of the vision of ambient intelligence requires developments both at infrastructure and application levels. As a consequence of the former, physical spaces are turned into intelligent AmI environments, which offer not only services such as sensing, digital storage, computing, and networking but also optimization, data fusion, and adaptation. However, despite the large capabilities of AmI environments, people's interaction with their environment will not cease to be goal-oriented and task-centric. In this chapter, we use the notions of ambient ecology to describe the resources of an AmI environment and activity spheres to describe the specific ambient ecology resources, data and knowledge required to support a user in realizing a specific goal. In order to achieve taskbased collaboration among the heterogeneous members of an ambient ecology, first one has to deal with this eterogeneity, while at the same time achieving independence between a task description and its respective realization within a specific AmI environment. Successful execution of tasks depends on the quality of interactions among artifacts and among people and artifacts, as well as on the efficiency of adaptation mechanisms. The formation of a system that realizes adaptive activity spheres is supported by a service-oriented architecture, which uses intelligent agents to support adaptive planning, task realization and enhanced human-machine interaction, ontologies to represent knowledge and ontology alignment mechanisms to achieve adaptation and device independence. The proposed system supports adaptation at different levels, such as the changing configuration of the ambient ecology, the realization of the same activity sphere in different AmI environments, the realization of tasks in different contexts, and the interaction between the system and the user. © 2009 Springer-Verlag US.