A distributed dynamic reconfigurable system for ambient intelligence

The concept of Ambient Intelligence has been developed during a series of ISTAG (Information Societies Technology Advisory Group) and other meetings as a guiding vision to give an overall direction to Europe’s Information Societies Technology program. Ambient Intelligence is essentially an elaboration of Mark Weiser’s vision of Ubiquitous but Calm Computing which stresses the importance of social and human factors as well as developing the base technologies on which aspects of the vision are founded. Although Ambient Intelligence covers a large range of concerns, both human and technical, there are some technologies which might be excluded. They are characterised by Mark Weiser’s statement about Ubiquitous computing: “Ubiquitous computing is roughly the opposite of virtual reality. Where virtual reality puts people inside a computergenerated world, ubiquitous computing forces the computer to live out here in the world with people.”. Seen in this light, Ambient Intelligence is the limit of a process which introduces the technology into people’s lives in such a way that the introduction never feels like a conscious learning curve: no special interface is needed because human experience is already a rich ‘Manual’ of ways of interfacing to changing systems and services. Somehow, we need to create technology that leverages this powerful human resource rather than trying to suppress it by requiring humans to participate in inflexible interaction protocols of the sort supported by current call center technology. A distributed system for ambient intelligence needs to solve several problems, the main one being task allocation and resource management. In particular, one can suppose to subdivide a wide area monitoring system in several elementary logical tasks to be allocated to physical processors that can be constituted by standard PCs, but also intelligent sensors or embedded processors. This paper analyses the problem of distribution of intelligence in detail and proposes a novel technique for dynamic task allocation and reconfiguration in a distributed system. A formalization of task allocation problem is proposed and a system that is able to automatically download and run logical modules onto physical processors is described. Proposed results demonstrate the validity of this approach.