Awareness in collaborative ubiquitous environments

Abstract

Collaborative Ubiquitous Environments (CUEs) are environments that support collaboration among persons in a context of ubiquitous computing. This article shows how results of the research in the Multi-Agent System (MAS) area, and in particular on MAS environments, can be used to model, design and engineer CUEs, with specific reference to the management of context-awareness information. After a description of the reference scenario, the Multilayered Multi-Agent Situated System model will be introduced and applied to represent and to manage several types of awareness information (both physical and logical contextual information). Finally, three different approaches to the design and engineering of CUEs will then be introduced and evaluated.