Mobile agents applied to smart homes : the virtual butler case study

Projeto apresentado à Escola Superior de Tecnologia e Gestão do IPL para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática - Computação Móvel, orientada pelo Dr. Nuno Costa.The concept of computer networks exists from a long time and has evolved until it became the Internet, a massive set of networks that allows everyone to communicate from all around the world, and access all kinds of information in a very short period of time. With this rapid growth of the Internet, technologies have also evolved, in such a way that a computer, something that previously was big and usually placed on a desk, is now so small that we can put it in our pockets, such as smartphones, tablets or simple smart wrist watches. With the use of these devices it is now possible to communicate and control a large set of appliances in a house, car, office and other places. With the communication of these small devices and appliances, the number of systems that automate and assist in the daily tasks has grown like opening doors, and windows, turning on the lights and music, checking the groceries list, checking appointments book and a lot of other tasks. Last year, these systems have focused not only in the general public but in specific niches of the population like blind people, old people and people with some kind of disability, acting like some kind of virtual butlers in their daily lives. In this work it was implemented a virtual butler based on mobile agents capable of speech recognition and speech synthesizing, by using a local network in the controlled environment of a house, as a case study to evaluate to what extent the mobile agents can be used to help people in their daily tasks. The work developed shows that it is possible to integrate mobile agents with other software and manage the addition and removal of features as needed, and provide a good interaction between the user and the agent. In short, mobile agents concept works and could be very useful when used to solve specific problems, and with the actual knowledge and infrastructures, with some work this concept could be reignited and great and useful solutions accomplished mainly in smart environments

Vers une programmation locale et distribuée unifiée au travers de l'utilisation de conteneurs actifs et de références asynchrones.

Dans le domaine des systèmes distribués, la notion de mobilité du code est à l’origine de nombreux travaux visant à améliorer les performances des applications parallèles (processus légers mobiles), à faciliter le développement d’applications (agents mobiles) ou à garantir la sécurité (cartes à puces). Dans ce contexte, nous montrons que les systèmes d’agents mobiles ont peu à peu disparu au profit de plates-formes d’exécution asynchrones. Nous présentons une nouvelle abstraction – appellée conteneur actif – qui est issue d’une modélisation en π-calcul d’un système d’agents mobiles, et qui semble être une brique de base avec laquelle les applications distribuées peuvent être conçues. Le développement d’une implémentation de cette abstraction en Java a fait apparaître un problème lié à la gestion de la concurrence dans les applications, distribuées ou non. Nous décrivons donc la notion de référence asynchrone – notre solution à ce problème – qui permet d’exprimer simplement la concurrence d’exécution dans une application. Notre implémentation en Java de ce concept facilite le développement des applications multithread ées et parallèles, en évitant le recours problématique aux threads par l’utilisation exclusive d’un unique paradigme : l’appel de méthode. Ce dernier peut se décliner en de multiples versions : synchrone, asynchrone, local ou distant. L’ensemble de nos travaux est disponible sous licence libre LGPL au sein d’une plateforme opérationnelle et documentée appellée Mandala qui est brièvement décrite.In the domain of distributed systems, several projects focus on mobile code in order to enhance the performance of parallel applications (mobile threads), to make easier the development of applications (mobile agents) or to guarantee security (smart cards). In this context, we show how mobile agent systems have basically disappeared in favor of asynchronous execution frameworks. We present a new abstraction – called active container – originating from a model of a mobile agents system. It seems to be a base layer on top of which distributed applications can be developped. A Java implementation of this abstraction raises a problem related to the management of concurrency in applications, distributed or not. We describe the notion of asynchronous reference – our solution to this problem – which allows to express concurrency quite easily. Our Java implementation of this concept eases the development of multithreaded and parallel applications avoiding the problematic use of threads by the exclusive use of a single paradigm: method invocation. This can be: synchronous, asynchronous, local or remote. Our work is available as an open-source LGPL licence package within a ready to use and documented framework called Mandala which is briefly described