Group Communication for Real-time Role Coordination and Ambient Intelligence

We propose a form of group communication, called channeled multicast, for active rooms and other scenarios featuring strict real-time requirements, inherently unreliable communication, and a continuously changing set of contextaware autonomous systems. In our approach, rooted in multi-agent and team programming, coordination and cooperation are supported via “social awareness” and overhearing. Overhearing also allows the collection of contextual information without interfering with running systems. We introduce the concept of implicit organization for coordinating agents, outline a general architecture, describe some of the protocols in use in our applications (interactive museums), and report on some initial experimental results.