Mobile Tourist Guide Services with Software Agents

Abstract

Applications for mobile devices have some restrictions because of the limited capabilities and heterogeneity of these devices. However, their communication capabilities allow the distribution of the application control and access to information in a network. If we also consider the changing environment when a user moves from one location to another, we should have software that is context-aware and able to adapt to new situations. Agent technology can support these requirements because of its distributed nature and the ability to combine flexible component architectures, some of them with planning and learning capabilities, which are appropriate for adapting to changing environments. In this paper we show one such application, a mobile tourist guide service, which has been built as a multi-agent system, where some agents are deliberative and combine the Beliefs-Desires-Intentions approach with learning capabilities of Case Base Reasoning techniques