The Intelligent Home Testbed

Abstract

Intelligent environments are an interesting development and research application problem for multi-agent systems. The functional and spatial distribution of tasks naturally lends itself to a multi-agent model and the existence of shared resources creates interactions over which the agents must coordinate. In the UMASS Intelligent Home project we have designed and implemented a set of distributed autonomous home control agents and deployed them in a simulated home environment. Our focus is primarily on resource coordination, though this project has multiple goals and areas of exploration ranging from the intellectual evaluation of the application as a general MAS testbed to the practical evaluation of our agent building and simulation tools. 1 Introduction The intelligent home project (IHome) at the UMASS multi-agent systems lab is an exploration in the application of multi-agent systems technology to the problem of managing an intelligent environment. We have implemented a sophistica...