Baton: a service manager for better sustaining agent coordination in smart spaces

Purpose – Smart spaces are open complex computing systems, consisting of a large variety of cooperative smart things. Central to building smart spaces is the support for sophisticated coordination among diverse smart things collaborating to accomplish specified tasks. Multi-agent systems are often used as the software infrastructures to address the coordination issue in smart spaces. However, since agents in smart spaces are dynamic, resource-bounded and have complicated service dependencies, current approaches to coordination in multi-agent systems encounter new challenges when applied in smart spaces. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues. Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents Baton, a service management system to explicitly resolve the particular issues stemming from smart spaces when coordinating agents. Baton is designed as a complement to coordination approaches in multi-agent systems with a focus on mechanisms for service discovery, composition, request arbitration and dependency maintenance. Baton is now deployed in our own smart spaces to achieve better agent coordination. Findings – The effectiveness and efficiency of Baton is validated by its practical use in the designed scenario and some evaluation experiments. Research limitations/implications – An attempt at performing dynamic service composition in Baton is made by using semantic information in future work. Originality/value – Baton, a service management system to explicitly resolve the particular issues stemming from smart spaces when coordinating agents is presented.