Toward an agent‐based pluggable infrastructure for context‐awareness

Abstract

Purpose

Pervasive computing enhances the environment by embedding many computers that are gracefully integrated with human users. The purpose of this paper is to describe the creation of a smart context‐aware environment in which computation follows people and serves them everywhere. Building such smart environments is still difficult and complex due to lacking a uniform infrastructure that can adapt to diverse smart domains.

Design/methodology/approach

To address this problem, the paper proposes an agent‐based pluggable infrastructure which integrates a mobile agent system named pvMogent, establishes an ontology‐based context model and introduces a workflow‐based application model with the open services gateway initiative (OSGi) framework. By plugging corresponding domain context in ontology model and different applications, the infrastructure can be customized to various domains.

Findings

Through the implementation of several context‐aware applications, it was found that the infrastructure can largely reduce the development complexity as well as keep the domain extensibility by plugging corresponding domain context in ontology model.

Originality/value

In this paper, a number of key techniques are explored which are suitable for building context‐awareness. The experiences and lessons learned from the system development could further facilitate and inspire the research in this direction.

Citation

Li, J., Bu, Y., Chen, S., Tao, X. and Lu, J. (2010), "Toward an agent‐based pluggable infrastructure for context‐awareness", International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications, Vol. 6 No. 3, pp. 286-310. https://doi.org/10.1108/17427371011084257