Context-aware agent platform in ubiquitous environments and its verification tests

This paper deals with the "ubiquitous personal agent," which distinctively provides information services to the individual user depending on his/her personal contexts. This is made possible by recognition of user contexts in ubiquitous environments through an agent technology used to realize context-aware intelligent environments. This agent technology consists of a "context reasoning agent" and a "lightweight intelligent mobile agent." The former is used for automatic recognition of various kinds of data and events which can be collected through realization of ubiquitous environments and of user "contexts." The latter executes appropriate decentralization of a large variety of personalization-related processing activities between various devices and server systems existing in the ubiquitous environments. In this paper, the details of the agent technology used are discussed and its effectiveness is confirmed by evaluation in tests of agent service using home information appliances already available on the domestic market.