Building Smart Spaces on the Home Manager platform

Smart Spaces refer to application scenarios where people are immersed in time and space in an augmented environment, exploiting ubiquitous computing technologies, space and time awareness, and pervasive intelligence. This paper focuses on Home Manager, an agent-based platform for the implementation of Smart Spaces in Smart Home contexts, rooted in the Butlers for Smart Spaces framework – the specialisation to Smart Spaces of the Butlers vision, aimed at supporting smart services to users immersed and interacting with their surrounding environment. The goal is to anticipate the users’ needs whenever possible, reasoning on potentially any kind of relevant data grabbed from a plurality of sources, as well as from the users’s preferences. Taking the case of a Smart Kitchen as our running example, we first discuss how the Butlers for Smart Spaces framework can be specialised to the Home Manager case and exploited to define smart appliances, then present the Home Manager technology in full, and show by a case study how a smart space can be deployed on its top. Home Manager’s support to intelligence is provided both by the TuCSoN coordination infrastructure, which enables intelligence to be spread on agents and on coordination artifacts, and by the tuProlog technology, which not only powers TuCSoN artifacts but also – being light-weight and Java-based – effectively supports the development of declarative (Prolog), imperative (Java,C#), and hybrid agents.