Designing an Intelligent Agent for Information Appliances

An intelligent agent architecture is proposed for integration of information appliances (IAs). Based on the characteristics of different IAs and the proposed agent module, the system designer can design different knowledge bases and communication interfaces for the different IA agents. Therefore, the IA agent will be used to promote the capabilities of the IAs. Also, the agent will follow up the rules in the knowledge base and environment information to make decisions for IA automation. Furthermore, agents can use an agent communication language for communication and cooperation with each other. In addition, by automatic communication and cooperation among the agents, an IA with the IA agents can generate more added-value functions than what a single IA system can provide. An implementation of IA agents in a smart home is used to demonstrate the proposed approach.