Supporting the Design of Self-Organizing Ambient Intelligent Systems Through Agent–Based Simulation

The ambient intelligence scenario depicts electronic environments that are sensitive and responsive to the presence of people. The aims of this kind of system is not necessarily to provide some form of electronic service to its users, but also to enhance the everyday experience of people moving inside the related physical environment. For this second type of application, computer simulation represents a useful way to envision the behaviour of responsive environments without actually bringing them into existence in the real world. This paper will describe the simulation of an adaptive illumination facility, a physical environment endowed with a set of sensors that perceive the presence of humans (or other entities such as dogs, bicycles, cars) and interact with a set of actuators (lights) that coordinate their state to adapt the ambient illumination to the presence and behaviours of its users. This system is made up of a model managing the self-organization of the adaptive illumination facility and an agent–based model to simulate pedestrian dynamics in the physical environment in which the system is deployed.