Contract-Based Cooperation for Ambient Intelligence: Proposing, Entering and Executing Contracts Autonomously

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) describes environments that sense and react to the humans in time to improve their living quality. Software agents are important in realizing such environments. While existing work has focused on individual agent’s reactions, more interesting applications will take place when the agents cooperate to provide composed services to humans. When cooperation is required, the environment needs mechanisms that regulate the agents’ interactions but also respect their autonomy. Accordingly, this paper develops a contract-based approach for offering composed services. At runtime, agents autonomously decide whether they want to enter contracts. Agents then act to fulfill their contracts. Ontologies are used to capture domain information. We apply this multiagent system on an intelligent kitchen domain and show how commitments can be used to realize cooperation. We study our application on realistic scenarios.