Smart Environments and Self-Organizing Appliance Ensembles

The vision of Ambient Intelligence is based on the ubiquity of information technology, the presence of computation, communication, and sensorial capabilities in an unlimited abundance of everyday appliances and environments. It is now a significant challenge to let ambient intelligence effortlessly emerge from the devices that surround the user in his environment. Future ambient intelligent infrastructures must be able to configure themselves from the available components in order to be effective in the real world. They require software technologies that enable ad-hoc ensembles of devices to spontaneously form a coherent group of cooperating components. This is specifically a challenge, if the individual components are heterogeneous in nature and have to engage in complex activity sequences in order to achieve a user goal. Typical examples of such ensembles are smart environments. It will be argued that enabling an ensemble of devices to spontaneously act and cooperate coherently requires software technologies that support unsupervised spontaneous cooperation. We will illustrate why a goal based approach is reasonable and how explicit goals can be used to find system comprehensive strategies and how explicit declarative goals could be used as a benchmark to evaluate the system design.