Integrating RFID in MAS through “Sleeping” Agents: a Case Study

Intelligent Agent technology is an important, exciting and relatively new paradigm in software design. The term intelligent agent is now used as an umbrella term representing a wide range of software with different characteristics and abilities [1]. This fact led to many definitions of intelligent agent, but the authors agree with the definition proposed by Wooldridge and Jennings [2] stating that an intelligent agent is a problem solving entity characterized by the following properties: • autonomy, the agent does the major part of its tasks without user intervention • social ability, the agent is able to communicate with other agents (or human beings) to solve a given problem. This property has an enormous importance because it requires that the agent is able to understand a language, to know when and with who this should communicate and so on. • Proactiveness, the agent takes the initiative to act on the surrounding environment when appropriate • Responsiveness, the agent is aware of the surrounding environment and can react to its variations. The natural evolution of the intelligent agent technology is the Multi Agent System (MAS) technology [3].Systems of this kind are composed of a set of intelligent agents interacting and collaborating each other to solve complex problems that are beyond the individual capability or knowledge of each agent. There are many applications of MAS in various problems. For example MAS technology was used in [4] to increase the reliable of a distributed sensor network, in [5] this technology was used for databases integration, in [6] as decision support system for an intelligent transport system, in [7] a MAS that implements mine detection, obstacle avoidance and route planning was proposed. In this work the authors will show the advantages that MAS technology can obtain combining the autonomy and proactivity of the intelligent agents and the intrinsic mobility of the RFID devices.